Here are some of news items I just can’t and won’t bring myself to write about.
Today, among these are:
- Anything to do with President Trump. I don’t know where to start but the examples today are that his message to his nation basically said the USA should take the opportunity of Thanksgiving to give thanks to him. I could have included reports that his proposed USA tax reforms will benefit the Trump family by over a billion dollars, or anything else he says or does.
- The poverty of skill in politicians exampled by the UK and Europe’s appalling attempt to negotiate anything and particularly Brexit. What a total mess they are making of negotiations all of them parading around like peacocks. Stop briefing and just get to work on it.
- Anything to do with the sexual harassment cases sweeping across the world over the last couple of months.
There are of course many, many more but these are items I have read about today.
It is not that I don’t have strong views about all these matters. These are important news items and they should worry me because, however they resolve, the outcome will change my world, my children’s world, and their children’s world. Not just this year but, forever. Invite me to a bar and I will bore you for hours on any of these but that is just the point.
They bore me, and that worries me far more.
I have reached that point of information overload that turns the important into the ‘oh, no, not again.’ I have become immunised against any reaction other than a shrug and an under the breath muttering of unsurprise.
I am bored because behind each of these there is a common theme: men and women driven to be powerful and behaving like powerful people have always done.
There is nothing that I read about politicians, film producers or corporate leaders that surprises me. I know that people in power have always abused their position. That is how they became powerful. We know that it is not the brainiest who get to the top but it’s those with the (and I am generalising) megalomaniac, sociopathic, genes that succeed.
Those are the genes that cause them to be ruthless in pursuit of their goal often without little remorse. I may have exaggerated just a little on the remorse tag, but just a little.
I have always been fastidious trying to sieve real from fake news but now I keep asking myself, ‘why bother’? Meanwhile, I will get on with my life. Sigh, as I read the news and wait for the broadcast that the end of the world is nigh. I just hope that on that day I am sitting on a tropical island, sipping my cocktail, letting the sea wash gently over my feet dangling in the ocean from the balcony of my villa.
How did I get here? By being ruthless and grabbing more than my share of the world!!