Friday, February 11, 2022

News Fatigue



Today’s post is a writing challenge. This is how it works: participating bloggers picked 4 – 6 words or short phrases for someone else to craft into a post. All words must be used at least once and all the posts will be unique as each writer has received their own set of words. That’s the challenge, here’s a fun twist; no one who’s participating knows who got their words and in what direction the writer will take them. Until now.

My words are:

hoaxed ~ favoritism ~ wolf in sheep’s clothing ~ running smoothly ~ poke bowl ~ manually

They were submitted by: https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/


I've had covid a second time and haven't slept well in months. Well, really in a year so this isn't the best thing I've ever written (I don't know if anything lately has been since I can write at most a paragraph at a time), but I want to keep the prompts going, and I hope in the next couple weekends I can functionally read well enough to catch up on comments. 

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Things aren't really running smoothly yet are they?

I mean I'd obviously hoped yet another politician hadn't turned out to be wolf in sheep's clothing, but, uh, let's just say those hopes weren't too high and yet here we are with...whatever the hell is going on in this place. Covid responses are as bad as ever with no new lockdowns here, overflowing hospitals, raging case numbers and we got 4 at home tests (per entire household) and maybe, if we're lucky and can scramble around for them, 3 better masks but we have to go out without one into busy pharmacies to pick them up ourselves. No checks, no eviction moratorium, no student loan relief, this business with Ukraine, what's been happening unchecked in Yemen, absolutely no bills to help the poor, fuck them kids, next to nothing to stop climate change, more deportations than ever, more police funding... I could go on.

The news lately has been all about the new cat at the white house. On a different channel they're probably still talking about whether a candy mascot is fuckable or not. Someone somewhere is writing that a poke bowl made at home is cultural appropriation and someone else is writing a dissertation in the comments about why that's wrong. Two headlines back to back will tell you that New York is giving us hope for Omicron and that new York's hospitals are past capacity. It's everything and nothing all at once and we just keep falling for it.

We really have been hoaxed into thinking we can't do better than this shit right here. We get hoaxed by the news every single day. Even if a person decides to manually look a thing up instead of letting their usual social media feeds tell them what's happening in the world, there are going to be 47,618 takes about any specific issue at minimum, and anything worth reading is going to be behind a paywall. Where do we go from here when good information costs money and conspiracies are free? Pay is low. Morale is low. Inflation is through the roof. How do we keep making it so people have to pay for even the most moderate info and still wonder why so many people are misinformed and lost? And don't tell me "well they should trust science" because if you know anything about our FDA, literally anything, then you should know why people don't trust our government when it comes to the medical field. Every day there's a new reason not to trust doctors. Every time the CDC contradicts itself so more people can get back to work sooner and keep lining rich people's pockets, people lose a little more of any faith they had that we get answers.

In a situation where people are already so fucking tired of all of this, where real news fatigue has set in, the constant changes and ridiculous focus on outrage about a fucking cartoon candy and how the company is obviously showing favoritism to the left by changing its CARTOON SHOES only increases the problems. Book burnings, fascists in Canada, mass shootings still happening all the time, people in a massive cult murdering their own families, worsening inclement weather events...

Where the fuck do we even go from here?

Don't answer that. I don't want to know.

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Links to the other “Use Your Words” posts:

Baking In A Tornado https://bakinginatornado.com/

On the Border https://dlt-lifeontheranch.blogspot.com/

The Diary of an Alzheimer’s Caregiver https://thediaryofanalzheimerscaregiver.com/

Part-time Working Hockey Mom https://thethreegerbers.blogspot.ch/

2 comments:

  1. What has me so furious right now is the (succeeding) efforts to rewrite history, both in terms of slavery and the holocaust. Why? Because these "people" are hoping to repeat it.

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  2. I am feeling the exact same way. I'm feeling like it's all a lost cause and that is heartbreaking. How we let 10% of the population ruin the lives of the other 90%. I have been married for 30 years, raised three kids and a niece and have 6 grands and a great grand. This year my husband and I filed for Chapter 7 and I feel like giving up. I have been streaming cooking shows just to avoid the news hounds. It's pretty bleak.

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