News Exhaustion

Last updated on: September 7, 2015 at 7:58 am by Anne Kennedy

News Exhaustion 2015-09-07T07:58:42-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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Color me exhausted by the unrelenting news cycle.

I had super important work to do this weekend which mainly included me sitting hunched over in my Sunday school room retyping worn out Sunday school lessons. Every few minutes Elphine, who was supposed to be cleaning the kitchen, would call to update me about the latest fight. So and so screamed at so and so. One or another sister had refused to participate in the cleanup. Violence and shrill voices were on the point of escalating. ‘What should I do,’ she kept wanting to know. ‘I don’t know,’ I would say, ‘tell them I said to say sorry.’ By the end of the weekend, not having completed the work I intended and really did need to finish, I tried to face the Internet for a few minutes but found myself completely overwhelmed, and then angry. So I rebelliously shut it all off and watched ten episodes of Wings.

Thing is, most of the time I’m good for the outrage. Most every single day I am happy to ride the rise and fall of terrible human drama and all the commentary surrounding it. When Facebook tells me to be angry, I’m good for the anger. When Twitter provides me with thousands of outrageous news stories, I read them all and dutifully fall into shock and horror. But the straw that’s breaking my aching back is the Syrian thing.

I mean, for heaven’s sake, there has been a war and a catastrophe in Syria for quite some many months. The news has been showing us the systematic destruction of Syrian and Middle Eastern Christians all this time and we’ve been biting our nails and freaking out, to absolutely no avail. Our own government contributed to the problem by…well, that would take up the rest of the Internet. Finally, Syrians, who have been all this time fleeing, have reached a critical mass, and so now the outrage and the cries for action are at a fever pitch. There are even pictures, now, that people are looking at, that fan the flames.

And I’m angry. I am. I’m angry that my own Bishop has been on capital hill knocking on every single door for the last year, trying to get any elected official to care about this before it is too late and has come away empty. I’m angry that the whole world is freaking out about the drowning death of a sweet little boy but when asked to consider the whole sale slaughter and trafficking of baby parts all we hear is a big collective ‘meh’. I’m angry that there is basically nothing I, as a single human being can do, except pray. I’m angry, oh my word, I’m so angry about the systematic rape of Yazidi women and young girls. You know what keeps me up at night, that, just thinking about that.

But, you know, who cares. Tomorrow the news will be something else and we won’t even remember this. The Syrian refugees will figure it out, probably. Maybe more of them will die and then we won’t have to worry about them. Surely, maybe even this afternoon, someone in America will be found not to support gay marriage and we’ll be able to stop thinking about the Syrians and rush off to be angry about all the hate.

It’s unrelenting. And, I’m pretty sure it’s working. Every single “informed” person can spend ten minutes being angry about each event and then they are off the hook for anything else. As long as you post ten outrages on Facebook, you can post ten cat videos and one woman fainting on a couch crying for more wine. And meanwhile, the landscape is cluttering up with huge massive terrible human dramas that aren’t going away, we’re just not thinking about them any more. It’s so exhausting, and depressing.

Still, there is God, and prayer, so I guess I’ll keep on with that.

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