For me personally, it's the volume. If you concentrate on your local area, particularly if you live somewhere smaller than a city, there are crimes and tragedies, but even if some of them are horrible they're relatively few and far between, and can be processed mentally. If you take the entire world of 7+ billion people you could spend your entire waking hours reading about brutality, tragedy and horror from around the world and not run out. Many of us - particuiarly new addicts - have psychologies that are tuned to stories which provoke emotion, so we're drawn to those them. Until relatively recently, you wouldn't be able to get many of those stories outside of occsaional TV programmes and "World's Grisliest Murders" books. But now there's a firehose of horror that you can tap into and it's both fascinating and debilitating. I've found the only way is to do what Charles Simic's dad did, and not read it. I hope that there's some kind of a resurgence in online local journalism that's not driven by advertising, because that feels like the only thing I should read on a day-to-day basis, unless there's something of national importance going on (which, unfortunately, in these days does actually seem to be every day).
I live thousands of miles away from New York city. A few months ago I was reading about someone getting into an argument in central park. Why am I being show that? It was to provoke an emotional response out of me. They are using our emotions to manipulate us.
Or maybe the advent of easy to use and accessible recording devices is shining a light on the prejudice and abuse that people with certain characteristics have been suffering from for decades.
Those with political power in the US could conveniently turn a blind eye to the problem with plausible deniability with a he said she said excuse, but now they have to face the problem.
I think that’s an important development in the progress of my country.
You should be having an emotional response to the huge undercurrent of racism and classism pervading society.
Why? They were being quite racist towards each other. Should I get involved somehow? Other than 'be angry' what are my choices? I literally can not change what those two do to each other. I sure did not feel sympathy towards either of the two people. I see neither party doing much to help at all. I see one party who has promised to fix that exact issue and made it much worse with poor economic choices and making people think they are getting a good deal. The people of those cities have consistently voted for that. So it is what they wanted. Now they seem shocked that they have made it worse. They literally voted for it.
