Marx had it wrong. Religion may have been the opiate of the people up to the 19th century, but today there is a different opiate. The so-called "News" is the opiate of the people. It is pervasive and invasive, 24/7, assaulting you everywhere and at all times. But who cares? Who cares about a crime committed thousands of miles away in a place you'll never see, concerning people you don't know? Who cares about a volcanic eruption on the other side of the planet? Who cares about the countless looming disasters, catastrophes, natural and man made? None of them will likely affect you. But yet, we are addicted to it, and anyone who ignores the "news" is a candidate for psychiatric treatment (ie., drugs).
It is clear that the news promotes neither knowledge nor happiness. It causes a more or less permanent state of vague anxiety which apparently serves to fill the terrifying void of silence. But like my hero, Jacques Cendahl, I am a disciple of silence; it is what I seek, it is my sustenance. And it is vanishing.
Instead we have a ceaseless onslaught of news. There is no room to think, to reflect, to independently assess one's place and one's time. Awareness is consumed by the irrelevant noise of the news, which is, by the way owned, produced, and dedicated to serving the needs of commerce.
But Thoreau said it much better than I in Walden
Hardly a man takes a half hour's nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, "What's the news?" as if the rest of mankind had stood his sentinels. Some give direction to be waked every half hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night's sleep the news is as indispensible as the breakfast. "Pray tell me any thing new that has happened to a man any where on this globe", -- and he reads it over his coffee and rolls that a man had had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.
........I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter, -- we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications? To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea. (Walden, chapter 2)
