Two things brought me down this week and neither one of them was the rain. This morning as the sky turned from granite to slate…the news was filled with the suicide of Robin Williams. I felt leaden…like my legs were too heavy. It happened yesterday but the news was so loaded with other dismal events that it was as if the media had to collect itself to decide how to approach the sudden death of this particular man…and the fact that he was a suicide. Well, he brought me joy on more than one occasion and many of those times joy was what I needed most. His suicide is none of my business…he lived his life and died his death. So R.I.P. Robin Williams.
The second thing actually happened before Robin Williams died. I debated whether I would even mention it here and decided that I would, if only to try to get it out of my head. We have been flooded with events over the past few years that have been called “the depths of depravity”, so much so that the term itself has lost its currency…lost its meaning. Whatever was the “depth” today will be deeper tomorrow. And while there may be nothing as obscene as war…the many conflicts going on around the world these days are not wars…they are mass murders and fall beyond obscene. It is only because mainstream media struggles to find terminology to allow themselves to keep our screens filled with this terrible imagery that we haven’t sat back and declared that this is necrophilia and that we should dedicate ourselves to putting a stop to the atrocities that spawn these images.
Of course the media is being manipulated. Much of this grotesque reportage is propaganda…generated to create a response, one way or another. At some point it ceases to shock…it merely becomes expected…it adds a tiny tingle to the accumulated numbness. And it drives the crazies even further into the outer reaches of madness. It’s there that the lines should be drawn. A British soldier hacked to death on a street in the U.K. in broad daylight…for the purpose of filming it!!!And just the other day a psychopath from Australia photographs his eight year old son holding up the severed head of a Syrian soldier…and posts it on the net. “Depth of Depravity”? I’m afraid that broadcasting these images is close to making media complicit. It’s no longer a matter of information…”see how brutal these people are…” It’s an invitation to outrage in an environment already overburdened with outrage. And it depresses me.
I’m old and I’m tired of all this. I was born during the Second World War…and there has been a conflict somewhere for almost my entire life. For a few minutes in the nineteen forties and early fifties I was Huckleberry Finn…took my fishing rod to the river, hung my feet off the dock. Some summer mornings when the temperature was heading for a hundred and there wasn’t a tickle of breeze…the river would flow quiet and flat as a sheet of indigo glass…sun washed… with a soft surface haze. Then there were old men in my town…though much younger than I am now…who talked not at all about the ghastly days of their service in the war just past. They wanted the end of that war to mean that they could put it behind them…buy a new Ford or Chevvy…maybe get a house and raise the kids…try to find “normal”. Then came Korea and whatever else followed. We have been incredibly lucky…it’s said, to have been born here in North America. A strange kind of luck…to be living someplace that isn’t split by conflict and strife and death and the slaughter of civilians, old young, men, women, children. And to be living in an age when we can watch it all on a screen half the size of our living room wall. How lucky is that?
I’m old and I’m tired of all this but I know it’s not going to stop and that all of these images of madness suggest that it can only get worse. I know that we have to keep finding ways to live with this and that thought is miserable. Finding ways to not accept…not ignore…but somehow cope.
Today I said hello to a total stranger…asked him how he was doing. It was raining by then and he looked up at the sky and smiled…”Good for the grass. ” he said.
August 12 2014
Chagal4's Blog 
September 26, 2014 at 5:22 am |
I think that everything said made a bunch of sense.
However, consider this, what if you composed a catchier post title?
I mean, I don’t wish to tell you how to run your blog, but what if you added a title to possibly grab folk’s attention? I
mean When it Rains I’m Blue | Chagal4’s Blog is a little plain. You
could peek at Yahoo’s front page and watch how they create post headlines to get viewers interested.
You might add a video or a related picture or two to get people
excited about what you’ve written. In my opinion,
it would bring your posts a little bit more interesting.
September 26, 2014 at 12:30 pm |
Point well taken, Thanks. I’m still struggling with inserting images. Using title hooks…good idea. Stay tuned and thanks for commenting. B.