Chuckle o' the day and my opinion on THE MEDIA

A few years ago I was at OR Tambo and our plane was delayed so I went to the Wimpy for coffee and to read the paper. I had been a regular newspaper reader; studying business and politics at the time had made me feel as though I should know what was happening in our country.

I picked up the paper and the top story was about the xenophobic attacks. There were pictures and stories about the intense brutality of the attacks. The next page was about government corruption, the next about some crime or another. I sat there paging through the paper and I just felt sick to be honest. Everything was always the same. People were forever killing each other; politicians were always corrupt. It just felt like a never ending cycle.

I decided then and there to stop reading the newspaper and stop watching the news on TV. It wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule, more like a lifestyle. I wasn’t going to sit and read pages and pages of how lame the world is. There was enough crap in my own life to make up for all the lameness that was happening out there.

However, a media-less society is a not a good thing. Without the media we wouldn’t know about xenophobia, we wouldn’t hold our politicians to account. I just don’t want to have to fill my mind with worries and fears about our ‘crumbling world’. If nobody exposed the truth about Apartheid the world wouldn’t have imposed the sanctions they did. So I’m all for the media, just not for me.

I feel like I’m choosing to focus on problems I can change, rather than problems I never will and never plan to solve. I’d rather make the change around me instead of sitting reading endless reports about how psychotic the Oslo killer was. Because that just bleaks me out, and then I don’t do anything.

Maybe you’re different. Maybe you’re the same. Good luck either way.

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