I had the strongest sense of deja vu reading this fantastic piece on how *depressing* it is to be informed these days. I don't know if I read a similar article before, or if it's just something I've been thinking about for a while, but the tagline really sums it up well: "Staying informed has become -- for so many of us -- a moral obligation that feels like hell."
As the author, Courtney Martin, laments,
Some weekends it feels like a masochistic, last-ditch effort to keep myself from going numb. Some weekends, I can hardly read the headlines without feeling myself being pulled into a morass of 21st century existential pain over the challenges of living aware in a globalized world with so much violence, soulless bureaucracy, and disappointing leadership. . . .
It seems to be that we haven't figured out systems -- educational, governmental, non-governmental -- for actualizing the inevitable outrage, sadness, and empathy that we feel as a direct result of contemporary world news.
I've been a news junkie ever since I can remember, and I was giddy when the internet made available more news and analysis on more topics and issues than I ever could have imagined. There's only so much one can read, though, so I started with mostly domestic electoral politics and foreign policy. And there's enough depressing news on those topics to last a lifetime.
A while ago, though, I decided to add to my list of topics to know something about. I decided that I knew embarrassingly little about health care, so I read a few books and started reading health care blogs. Not surprisingly, this is a pretty gloomy subject: lots of people uninsured, underinsured, and generally getting screwed.
Then, God help me, I added some feminist blogs to the rotation. And sure, everybody knows that women are mistreated in a variety of contexts, but when you read the actual stories, day after day, at home and abroad, it's really quite horrifying.
Plus economics here, global warming there, and poverty way over there (but wait, also here), it's pretty overwhelming -- and more importantly, it seems like nothing one individual (or even a small group of individuals) would even begin to make a dent.
No wonder I've made CuteOverload a part of the rotation -- adorable animals are the only thing that can push back against this onslaught . . .
