The Emerald Rose

          Since I was a kid, I loved history, and followed it for the last 65 years of my 72. History REQUIRES that you know what happened, why it happened, and when it happened, to properly assess it’s present and future impacts on the world. More recently we have looked with a lot more depth into the details and studied the ramifications of actions two or three centuries and it’s impact on us in today’s society, culturally, politically, economically, and every other function you can define.

          But I am now detecting a trap we have been lured into,….the “demand” for immediacy in history, in all of it’s sometimes ugly facets is now paramount in the “News” business, ergo our instant history source! I’ll be the first to admit I am a “news Junkie”, and my wife and kids will strongly attest to it,….in spades! So recently I started thinking about my “obsession” to know the “latest, newest, and most important analysis of the “news”! At all levels of our world, local, statewide , nationally, and internationally. (If we had expanded into other planets and galaxies, ….well, I’m sure we would have a “Mork” newscaster reporting 12 times a day for Fox News, CBS, MSNBC, and ABC. “This is Mork from Ork, reporting on the potential for the weakening of the Intergalactic travel  regulations as we move ever closer to the “open Border Concept in the existing  galaxy and those beyond Andromeda who are not as advanced and lack the necessary “extreme vetting” of refuges between galactic nations!”

          The biggest question is a simple one, …are we currently exceeding our own capacity to ingest, assimilate, and really make sound judgments on what we have, before we rush headlong to the next level?

         As a kid growing up in the 50’s and 60’s our parents, in particular our fathers started the whole thing! (That’s a new millennial “back blame” idiom,… “it’s wasn’t us, we were cast into this by our parents!”

        Dad usually got home from work between 5pm and 6pm, back in the 50’s and early 60’s. Put on his “slippers” sat in the easy chair, scanned the evening newspaper, (That’s right most “city folk” had a ‘morning edition’, AND an ‘evening edition’, of the daily newspaper, that dated back hundreds of years. Dad’s usually went to the “Sports pages” first, see how the NFL, AFL, NHL, and NBA and MLB were doing, and the “box scores” of the particular “seasonal” sport. I could write on the “salvation of the family” which were the “in-between times” when Baseball finished in early October, Football began around Thaksgiving,  and hockey commenced in December, and Basketball in Mid-January early February. SPORTS were spaced adequately that there were times to converse as a family, Mom and Dad to “go for a walk” albeit in the neighborhood we lived, and even take us (the kids) and  go to places like “The Zoo,, the Children’s Museum, or the BIG Sears and Roebuck to ogle and drool over things as Christmas got closer.   

         During the Professional Football Season, Mom would pack all five kids in the car, and “go for a ride”, so Dad could enjoy his football without a bunch of little wild Indians  jumping on him and running around whooping and hollaring. (Now a days we have “man-caves” for that purpose).

        As radio and TV grew news became more readily, and more often available to everyone. The TV networks began to battle for the viewership with names like Walter Cronkite,  Huntley and Brinkley, John Cameron Swayze, and others, and “Public Television” also appeared. The “NEWS WINDOW” began to expand from 6-7 to 5-7, and then 5-7:30 in the evening. During those times dinner, cleanup and dishes  and “homework” were the time-fillers. BUT then the network folks started thinking, …..and along came 20/20 , and 60 minutes, and that ilk!

       But the “biggie”, that changed our lives was Turner Network Broadcasting, created by Ted Turner in 1980, as an all news network 24 hours a day for the new kid on the block, “cable TV”. It was an insomniacs nirvana!! It was constantly morphing and getting more professional. It’s zenith was in the early 1990’s when we went to war in the Middle East. It was live that evening when George Bush Sr. announced the invasion to drive Iraq out of Kuwait with a “coalition” of Nata countries as well as in the field video taped bombs falling, explosions, fighting, and armored war machines plodding through the desert, and all the gory reality of a REAL WAR! It was enthralling, everyone watched it out of more morbid curiosity as to what “war” was like,….for real. During Vietnam Nam we had filmed clips assembled with “voice overs” and comments by the network anchors back in the studios. But now we saw “Wolf Blitzer” broadcasting from the roof of his hotel, amid dropping AND exploding bombs and a 100% vicarious overview of LIVE war. We were hooked at that point on live news! As the New York Papers are for of saying, “All the news that’s fit to print”, …..AND WE WANT IT LIVE IN REAL TIME,…..NOW!!!

       Our emotions, our fears, our “curiosity”, and our apprehensive and skeptical  natures were demanding it.  “We have the capability, the capacity, and the power to make it happen,….and we DEMAND IT!”  So they gave it to us!! And we’ve been paying for it ever since,…..in numerous ways, our cable TV, our willingness to let “talking heads” killl our at least supposedly honest written media, a/k/a newspapers etc. . Allowing Special interests and others “direct” access to our minds via “breaking news, special alerts” and other “grabbers” to suck us back in to what’s happening NOW!!

      Perhaps we all need to regulate life more earnestly, and go back to “NEWS” at 6pm and reading a newspaper if you want to find objective “sides” upon which to make your decisions, not that of all the networks, be they be “fair and balanced” or other!

     I’m ready to start the back to the 50’s and 60’s “NEWS CYCLE” just to bring down my blood pressure and aggrevational level. Oh and don’t get me started on the same thing on SPORTS! To me, I think sports are good, but NOT the be all and end of life. News is important, BUT it seems to be controlling more of my life than I’m ready to give it, and it’s time to make a change.

     Maybe I’ll speculate on the “vehicles of change” possible in the next couple of blogs!

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