CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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The Difference Between Bad News and Politics

Sunday, June 17, 2012

this entry brought to you by kanye west, "power"


I'm a news person, but specifically, I'm a politics person. I keep up with the news as much as I can because I feel stupid not knowing what's going on. I need to be informed; there's nothing worse than apathy and ignorance, especially when the apathetic and ignorant choose to criticize things when they don't know shit about shit.

But it depresses me and I don't just mean in a general malaise, I mean it can bog me down on such a fundamental level that it can drastically effect my mood for days. Sometimes I wonder if it would be better for me to just stop paying attention, to check out, to not engage, but I feel like that would make me not just ignorant and apathetic, but worse, not me.

The thing is, it's not necessarily bad news that bothers me. Natural disasters will depress me something fierce, but general horribleness doesn't effect me as much. For example, when some horrible person murders a baby, it pisses me off, sure, but it's easy for me to not have my mood fundamentally change. With a baby murderer I can say to myself, this person is a horrible person, fuck them, I hope they go to jail and rot forever. I hope horrible things happen to them. But a horrible person doing a horrible thing is not an indicator of things in general.

Politics on the other hand, can bring me under such a horribly deep, fundamental depression that I'm not sure if it isn't having a physical effect on me. When a horrible person does a horrible thing, fuck them. Yet there are a gigantic number of people-- and yes, the number of people lowers every year and drastically lowers every generation-- there are still people that care so much about hating gay people they will argue that rules and laws that put homosexuals on the same level as heterosexuals somehow violates their religious right to abusive and discriminatory.

Right now, in the year 2012, there are gay teenagers that are coming out to their parents and being kicked out of their homes, their stuff left on the front lawn, the locks changed. You and I might not know anyone this has happened to, but the closer to the middle and the south you go on the map, this happens with alarming regularity. This is the stuff nightmares are made of. Baby killing might be in your nightmares, but it's the kind of startling thing you'll wake up from. Dreaming that your parents have kicked you out of the house and left your things on the front lawn is the kind of thing you'll struggle to wake up from but can't, and will wake up as close to tears you be without actually crying, and it can be hours before you cheer up.

This is the kind of thing that makes you not want to engage in anything beyond your happy little bubble. Sure, baby killers enrage me. But they don't make me feel like I honestly might need to find a prescription for these stomach pains I've been having.
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with love from CRS @ 9:25 PM 

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