Saturated Yellow Journalism

I’m tired of 24 hour coverage of every unfortunate event on the planet. I think 9/11 was the overload point for me. I think I watched the news for like a week straight, because I, like 250 million other Americans and untold numbers of the rest of the world, wanted to know ‘who the hell did this’ and ‘why’. The news media overloaded us on coverage before 9/11 but for some reason, after that, it was beyond reasonable.

Yellow journalism means to sensationalize the news beyond it’s true meaning in order to increase the number of viewers, and I’d say that the media today goes above and beyond that, looking for every sick and disturbing angle of current events, anything that will take the shock value to another level and get John Q Public’s mouth gaping “Oh my God!” The media rarely ever focuses on anything good these days, instead working hard to insure we are daily saturated with the worst aspects of the human existence. Is it any wonder we have school shootings, children committing heinous crimes at such early ages, when they turn on the television and even the news is a barrage of violence?

Everyday now I get to spend 3 half hour sessions with CNN at the chow hall, and it sickens me. Do I feel bad for the people affected by hurricane Katrina? Yes, of course I do, but I do not need to be inundated, deluged, literally immersed into it day after day after day, in fact, I think at a point the human aspect of this tragedy is lost because we become immune to what we see at some point.

Then of course, to make this particular news event even more ‘yellow’, you have lame brain dipshits like Wolf Shitzer on CNN asking questions like “Do you believe the response to the hurricane would have been much faster had Katrina hit a city populated by predominantly ‘white’ people?” He posed this incredibly racist and ignorant question to a black congressman, and this congressman of course showed his racist side by jumping right on the question, stating that of course the response was slow because the majority of New Orleans is populated by low income African Americans.

If questions like that are acceptable, then how about THIS question? “Do you believe the looting, rapings, beatings, and shootings would not have happened had Katrina hit a city populated by predominantly ‘white’ people?” OH MY, fraNk, how could you say that? Wait, now hold up, BOTH questions are equally unacceptable, what amazes me is that anyone who would call themselves a ‘journalist’ would bring up either question. Race did NOT play a part in the hurricane response, it’s so lame brained an idea.

The ENTIRE infrastructure of New Orleans was GONE, the first responders are normally the city, then state. THEN the Federal kicks in. In this situation, city and state were basically powerless due to the destruction of the infrastructure, no roads, no hospitals, nothing left. So the lack of immediate response shouldn’t fall on the Federal government, it shouldn’t fall on anyone, it’s just the nature of this particular beast, this disaster was beyond what was expected.

But back to my previous topic, about the lootings and rapings, or the response being slow due to the people being ‘poor blacks’, why does race have nothing to do with it? Because let’s say the majority of people left in a city decimated in such a way had been low income whites, those in the trailer parks with the rusted pickups. They would have had the same lawlessness, the same types of crimes being committed. As far as the response being slow, well, I’ve addressed that, and anyone who is still stupid enough to believe there is a racist issue behind it, or even stupider, that the white house didn’t care because they were African Americans, go ahead and wallow in your disgustingly racist fantasy land, you aren’t fooling anyone but yourself.

Current Lyrical Ramblings

I built my life on a rigid frame.
So nothing bends it only breaks into pieces and pieces.
I waited for hope to arrive but it never came.
Leaving me with only pain inside.

The Deep End – Crossfade

“Trainin’ Trainin’ Trainin’”

Wow, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted here. We have been so busy though, getting our mobilization up, doing our WTT classes, qualifying on ranges. This past weekend people’s families were allowed to come down, from 1600 Saturday till 2000 Sunday (that’s 4 pm Saturday till 8 pm Sunday, for you civilians out there). Belly couldn’t come because she needed to give them a specific amount of time notice before she would be allowed to leave, and they didn’t let us know until too late. But truthfully, paying probably 600 dollars or so (plane ticket, car rental, hotel room) for one day probably wouldn’t have been all that good, so we are going to try for one of the longer visits later, maybe a three day? *crosses fingers*

So, how goes things? Well, so far so good I guess, things are really a clusterfuck sometimes, but we are making it work. All in all I believe we have a good group of people who are all gelling together very well. Today some of us were doing land navigation while the rest of the company went and fired at the M249 SAW and .50 Caliber range. I was with the land navigation group, I spent about the last 20 minutes cleaning branches, leaves, neddles, dirt, etc, out of my shirt, crotch, pants, and hair. Not to mention the scratches all over my legs from the tangle foot and thorny bushes down in that little marsh we had to navigate to get to one of our points. But honestly, I enjoy that sort of shit, because that makes me feel closer to my infantry roots. HOOAH!!

I am in a room with 2 other SSG’s, and we are packed in here like sardines when you add in 3 duffel bags, 2 foot lockers, a ruck sack, and a personal bag, EACH person has this much stuff. Soon we have to send our foot lockers and 2 of our duffel bags into shipping containers to be sent over to the middle east by boat, so now the tricky part is trying to decide what we can live without for 2 months and putting it in the foot lockers and 2 duffel bags (they send all that stuff early so we have it when we get there, but the problem is that we can’t have it obviously for the next 2 months).

We have a little bit of internet, but we won’t have our actual good connection until Friday. Right now we are ‘piggy-backing’ off someone else’s connection, and it’s not very reliable at all. Also sometimes there are probably 30 or so people on that one connection and it’s just overloaded. All wireless of course. I can’t wait till we get a GOOD internet connection.

I get time to message belly back and forth using Yahoo messenger each night, which has been nice. I don’t really know what I would do without her in my life. There are so many ways in which she enhances my life, I give thanks everyday that I was lucky enough to find someone like her, and even luckier that she was okay with marrying a dork like me : )

Well, probably need to get a couple of things done around here so I’m going to keep it short, we are perpetually busy these days, hoping it starts to slow down sometime. Hope to keep you a bit more posted as to what is going on around here.

Current Lyrical Rambings

Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.
Shine on you crazy diamond.

Shine On You Crazy Diamonds – Pink Floyd