Newsworthy

Let’s see, how many things are going on today of newsworthy importance — things I could blog about — that I don’t really know anything about.

Okay, did I just ask myself to list the things I don’t know? 😉

Anyway, lets see, we have:

1) Ferguson

2) ISIS

3) Gaza

4) The HUGOs

5) Amazon vs. Hachette

I am sure the list is much shorter than it should be…

For someone who spent his college years and 20s in the newspaper business, I find myself quite disconnected and uninterested in much of  the news spinning around me these days — though with a bit of context I am still quite capable of generating an opinion on just about any news story. What it reminds me of is something my mother said to me while I was in college.

Going to college in the 80s, I got to hear a fair bit from certain professors about the events of the 60s that they grew up in — civil rights, marching, riots, etc. Knowing that my own parents had been around at the time, I decided to ask my mother about these events, about the 60s, to get her perspective instead of just the academic cant I was receiving. What I got was something different. “I don’t know anything about those things” she said. “I didn’t pay attention. I was too busy raising a family.”

News is the extraordinary.  News obscures.  News is the 10% of the iceberg that is seen, and not the 90% that make up the real bulk, and may be entirely different.

Yet most of us are doing the truly extraordinary — staying ordinary and doing the regular — building a life, a family, a world.