We received this polite request from one of our readers today:
Dear Crikey,
Please publish some good news. You’re making my girlfriend sad.
Thanks.
Ben
Zoe Williams from The Guardian agrees. She writes of a news cycle on crack:
“There is such an abundance of news that it’s torpedoed the news agenda. How do you make an agenda, when everything is as important as everything else? There is just too much news …
“There is also a sense of headspin, of being unable to digest one tragedy before another happens.”
The effect, says Williams, “is a news twilight, where you can’t even be sure what has been confirmed and what hasn’t”.
When Amy Winehouse’s death registers as item item No.5 on the Sunday night news, something’s up. But as Williams writes, try to imagine the “teeth-grinding frustration of the director of UNICEF, David Bull, who took out full-page adverts in the UK national press last week to say: ‘I am writing for your support in moving the news agenda . The story about phone hacking does matter, but there’s another, far bigger and vital story that’s going unreported’.”
Today in Crikey, Rafiq Copeland reports from the epicentre of African relief efforts in Dadaab. As if widespread and devastating famine wasn’t enough, he writes:
“… new arrivals to Dadaab that I have spoken with also report al Shabaab preventing people from fleeing the region. Refugees tell stories of r-pe, mutilation with bayonets and other brutalities committed at the hands of the militants. It’s likely much of this violence is as much banditry born out of chaos as it is an organised campaign.”
The world is indeed in chaos. Sorry, Ben’s girlfriend.
sorry.
Cadel won the Tour, Ben’s girlfriend
Dr Harvey M Tarvydas
” The world is indeed in chaos. Sorry, Ben’s girlfriend……..”
No it isn’t. And we have more technical ability to be less so now than ever.
But we are still just Human and while some are magnificent the ‘chaos’ you think you’re recognizing is your recognizing of the usual Human as a miserable mean ugly and selfish animal (say pig) or one so disempowered he can’t bear to think what he might think about others misery.
No, priority is ‘fight the carbon tax that doesn’t exist rather than care about the shocking starvation and death IN THIS TIME IN HISTORY. Man is a ‘pig’ and we should be clamouring to dissociate with that race of man.
This is an emergency not a donation to charity time.
The UN is a quaking duck lying on its back, rendered so by all our governments led by the US, the most offensive cesspool of humans.
The UN needs to be renamed for the future and retrained in humanitarian action. The psychology of power is in the name and currently its name tells it that it is owned.
The United Humanitarian Nation of Nations given priority empowerment by all signatory nations to ‘act then tell’ rather than ‘beg to act’.
Governments won’t bring this about but the people of the Earth can, let this be ‘our’ SPRING for all.
Dr Harvey M Tarvydas
I suppose that makes me a ‘leftie’ or ‘commie’.
It just makes me the ‘revolutionary’ I have had to become trying to get my two professions to get out of the same quagmire, and I have to live with the wounds inflicted by the ‘resistance’ (mostly pigs).
It is my observation that all these disasters are meant to make you stop and think. What is life all about, what part are you playing or not playing? A lot of good can come from stopping a sitting quietly with “bad news”.
Have you appreciated what you have, your family, friends, etc. Is there something you could contribute? Just sitting and “praying” or sending loving thoughts to a disaster area can have an effect. We are not disconnected beings. What happens to someone else does affect us.
Lesli Grant
Perth, Western Australia