Well, I've done it to myself again. For a long time I did really well at not watching American news because it just depresses me. I still kept up with reading the Economist every week and catching the occasional news blip on my BBC app. I have started going to the gym again though, which proves troublesome when there is mostly only news on the TVs in front of where I ride the exercise bike. I get lured into watching these talking heads who go on and on about how awful everything is and it just depresses me. Looks like it's time to get more podcasts so I can listen to them instead of watching the news again.
There has also been a recent uptick in my FB feed with everyone and their mother (quite literally) posting about Obamacare and how bad it is going to be for everyone. The problem is I have yet to see anyone post any viable alternatives in order to get better health care to the 50 million Americans who not insured right now. I did just see something pop up at the top of my iPad so I'm going to check that out.
I did a post, the one someone just posted to that hopefully offers some alternatives, that posed the question what are the viable alternatives. The reason I did this is because I was influenced by my last boss who had a good habit of wanting teachers to have alternative solutions whenever they came to him with a complaint. That seemed like a great policy to have as a leader.
That being said, there will always be people who hate certain laws and just want to complain about them all day without offering any alternative solutions. It seems to me to be a waste of time, even though I do the same on often enough occasion that I'm pointing the finger directly back at myself as it were. Facebook has proved interesting over the past 6 years since I've joined. It has morphed a certain amount and now it appears everyone just uses it to complain either about their personal problems or our nation's problems, myself included. I do try to withhold on a lot of the personal complaining though, but I more than make up for it in political complaints I'm sure.
As everyone else has I'm sure, I've either seen people tear one another to shreds or done it myself. Admittedly I get a certain satisfaction out of this which is easily identified as sin in my heart. Would we argue like that if we were face to face with each other, perhaps a true Facebook per say? Of course not! But perhaps that's why we like Facebook so much, it allows us to say whatever we want without the necessity of common decency.
There's a thing called trolling that I've heard of and understand it to mean something I do on occasion. It means you post stuff on FB or Twitter just to get people riled up. I usually do this when I have read too many of my conservative friends posting stuff and figure they need a good dose of the opposite side. It's not very fruitful but it sure can be fun. The problem is that many people, including myself, are so passionate about politics that they take everything way too personally.
In short, I'm going to relegate myself to the Economist and BBC News again for a while and not watch the news at the gym anymore. Maybe I'll even take a break from Facebook for a while although I do enjoy it as a way to get my blog to more readers. The Economist and the BBC News are not perfect by any means but I prefer them to FOX, CNN, MSNBC and all the other American ones, that's for sure. They don't seem to be quite as biased. Of course, if I was from England I might have the opposite views that the stations and news sources I don't like they might think are less biased, who knows?
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