The news. Is it a source of information, or just a means of massive mind manipulation? When should we listen and when should we click the off button? Does it truly do the function it is meant to do: inform, and allow for a democratic society, or is it just a mask behind a homogenous group of control? Does the news stimulate positive reactions full of hope, joy, and happiness, or does it stimulate fear? Fear as the perfect weapon for control. Who is behind this massive mind control?
These are questions I have posed again and again. I am befuddled, till this day. I turn on the television and read the newspaper and all I see and all I hear is a repetition of the same events again and again and again, events that always seem to evoke all fear possible within my veins. A fifteen year old girl raped and killed, a seventeen year boy holding the gun, an old man strangling his family, a young baby dead on the floor. If it does not involve kidnapping, killing, rapping, drugs, and crimes the news would be no news at all.
Is what is truly happening in the world this devastating? Has the world always been this violent? I seem to think it has. But why does it give the impression that the world is always about to fall into a deep black whole? If it is not global warming, if it is not war, if it is not oil availability and prices of oil, or if it isn’t this talk of recession, we would have little to look for in the future. Is the truth that humans seek conflicts and need such conflicts during the entirety of our existence? Do we get excited in the name of conflicts? Or is the true nature of our species one that seeks to find the conflicts in order to fix them? Are we killing gorillas or are we saving them? Do we pollute the world or do we invest to save it? Do we destroy or do we heal?
The truth is, that it is neither. News tells us it’s both, in very appealing ways making us believe it is the same non-controversial idea. The news maneuvers our mind to think about all these things and join causes. Save Darfur. Save the environment. But does it make a difference? Did we in fact land on the moon? Is the United States going to launch a mission to mars soon with actual human beings or is it a preparation to continue “news” after this political surge ceases in a few months following November?
Is there an actual war? Or is this another 1984? I could have sworn we were against terrorism here. And wasn’t there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Or was that Iran? Sorry, I forget it’s the same country, and Afghanistan the capital. And while we think and wonder about the success of the war, and protest against it while others praise it, and while men die in battle and failure of establishing a stable democratic political system, the “news” is going and going and going. Shut it up. Shut it up. But then again, who to shut up? Who is behind this homogenous spread of “truth”?
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