Absorbing the News

TURNING ON THE NEWS can be risky, emotionally, intellectually. I know people who have renounced all news on a temporary basis, discovered that they enjoy newslessness, and never went back. One wonders about the impact on their awareness of current events and the state of the world. Maybe none of that concerns them. Most of the time when I watch or listen to or read the news, I sustain at least one emotional shock, one intellectual shock, and not a few head scratching eyerolling moments. A couple of days ago, on National Public Radio, my "go to "source of news, the news person calmly announced that president Biden and the Prime Minister of Britain were engaged in high level talks, about whether to allow Ukraine to use the long range rockets and missiles, weapons given and sold to Ukraine by those two countries, to be fired at targets deep inside Russia. No other itmes were listed for the agednaitems of the two heads of state. One decision, and one only; whtehr to allow Ukraine to fire long range missiles deepinto Russia. WE ar doomed, I thought. Russia is rapidly gtting into a situation in which she will either need to start peace negotiations with Ukraine, or resort to nuclear war, as Putin has indeed threatened to do. Listening to this gloomy report, I reflected,again, on how fortunate I have been to have lived my life when and where I did, and also,that the world of twenty twnty four is not quite like the one I had imagined I would live in, a half century ago, when I often speculated on the next fifty and a hundred years. I knew in 1970, for instance, that the twenty first century would be quite different from teh late twentieth; I forsaw teh sweeping growth of computer technology; I recall talking to a friend in 1981, and predcting to him that books printed on paper, hard copy boooks, would become extinct, and that all reading would be done on computer screens. Obviously, I was quite wrong. My friend knew it t the time; he responded to me that no matter what developments occurred with computers and computer screens, there would always be books in paper and print, simply because people love physical books, and would never consent to their extinction, would never consent to a reading life entirely confine to a computer screen. He was, of course, quite right. Nobody predicts the future well. Nobody. But I never would have predicted either that there would be a massive twenty first century land war in Europe, nor that books would still exist. And of course, in 1970, nobody said a word about climate change, even though the same information, information concerning carbon accumulation in the atmosphere and historical climate and temperature trends, was available. Back then, we just didnt see it. Confronted with all this, we are saddled with the dreadful specter of a candidate for president of the United States, and his Vice presieential candidate, both emphatically declaring, and repeating often, that there are immigrants living in the United States, dark skinned immigrants who are living in Ohio and eating dogs and cats. Such is the mentality of our potential near future leadership in America, confronted with the daunting circumstances named above. We have already had in America, and may well have yet again, national leaders who embrace wild and false conspiracy theories, advocate policies which would return America to the nineteenth century, and declare, emphatically, that immigrants are devouring America's pets.