Mini Rant: Opium of Irrelevance

I’m taking a yogurt break at work, and as I headed towards the fridge to get my snack I heard the downstairs lobby TV blaring with the latest irrelevant bit of nonsense from the Jodi Arias trial. If you’ve been following this blog you already know how I feel about this sort of thing being dressed up as real news. For whatever reason, though, today I felt incensed. For crying out loud, a bunch of people, including children, died yesterday in that huge tornado in Moore, Oklahoma. Syria is in the midst of a civil war where even more people are being injured, traumatized, killed. The US Justice Department is essentially staking out reporters and potentially threatening press freedom. We’ve now surpassed an atmospheric carbon load of 400 PPM – beyond the threshold where we can recover from the effects of climate change. And THIS is the day’s big news? I’m horrified, saddened, jaded, cynical. This is the bullshit – the irrelevant, completely pointless crap – that lulls people away from the real news. Jodi Arias should only be relevant to Jodi Arias, her family, the victim’s family, and the criminal justice system in Arizona. IT IS NOT NEWS. It is an opiate that keeps people sated and hallucinating that what they hear is relevant, and it makes me furious.

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