Happy Mother's Day for all the mothers out there. It's a great day for all Mom's to sit back, relax and guilt your children into waiting on you hand and foot today because on the other 364 days of the year you are the one doing the waiting =) Milk it for all it's worth....
It's a slow news day. It has been a slow news day for a couple of days now, actually. I don't know about you but I'm getting bored with all the Usama stuff. He was a schmuck and he got killed and it's done. I'm not the least bit interested in dissecting his life. Unfortunately, this creep will go down in history whether we think he is evil or whether we think he is a hero. Depends on which side you're on.
Frankly, people who admire a man who killed so many innocent people across the world for an ideology scare me. I have no desire to sit and analyze WHY people admire him. But I do know that if you do admire him...You have a sick mind.
I remember back in the 70s watching the news as a young person. The world was scary. I remember Dan Rather mostly. Peter Jennings and Dan Rather. Back then I didn't know much. I basically knew as much as my Mom cared to explain to me which was usually to the point and short explained. I remember once expressing how "cool" I thought Nazi uniforms looked and got a stern lecture from my sister about the horrors of the Holocaust. I remember watching that TV series about the Holocaust and how bone chilling it was. I was too young to understand it all but old enough to know evil when I saw it. Back then the 1940s in black and white seemed like 1000 years ago.
Today I recognize how in the 1970s....that just really wasn't that many years after the 1940s. It's like us looking back to the 70s now. So in the 70s we were getting a taste of the Middle East with Israel on the news a lot. I remember the Iranian hostage crisis. I think that was the first event that truly creeped me out about the Middle East. Looking at the mobs of people dressed up like some kind of Monty Python movie chanting "Death to America" was very unnerving. I remember watching Ronald Reagan come to power (and the news media was actually relieved if you can believe that) and very specifically thinking to myself "these people are going to come back and be our worst nightmare. " I was very glad they were so far away and it seemed improbable, if not impossible, for them to come here and get me.
It's not improbable or impossible today. In fact....It is likely.
Our world is changing quickly because of modern technology. Back in the 1970s we did not have satellite TV. When you watched the news a news anchor sat at a desk and explained the news. They did not rely on videos very much. If they showed video it was grainy and scary looking and it was days, weeks and even months old. We certainly didn't have HD or graphics or anything of the sort. In fact, most people back then relied on newspapers for most of their news. Just like the weather alerts...back in the day when you couldn't track a tornado in 3D they were a lot more scary. Hearing the weather warnings on TV when I was a kid was akin to nuclear war. The sound of the warning, the male, monotone radio-voice warning a county to hide was terrifying.
When cable TV came out it was quite remarkable. The quality went up and when CNN came out it was a monumental change. Headline news was the very first time we could turn on the news any time of the day. In fact, TV usually shut off at night for six hours. Late night shows like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman were the first late night shows along with SNL. After that, poof. The TV went dead. Then cable came along and all the night owls finally had something to watch when everybody else was sleeping.
We sit here in our HDTV 3D world and the kids today have no recollection of those days. World War II could have been the Civil War as far as their perspective goes. We freak out and have all this sensationalized news crammed down our throats day in and day out but you know what? It's not as scary as it was back when I was a kid and a tornado warning went off and we all ran to the hallway expecting a tornado any minute to demolish our house.
We've lost our scary world. My kids play video games scarier than any tornado warning. So is it any wonder we are watching socialists and Marxists take our country over and the younger kids don't bat an eye? They don't know how to be afraid. They scoff at fear. We kids grew up from our scary upbringing and basically taught our kids not to be afraid of anything....and they are not. As long as they have their cell phones, video game systems and ITunes they are perfectly happy.
Which is more scary to you? A fanatical group of religious zealots who have joined forces with socialists to destroy our country, or a generation of kids who grew up on Nintendo whose biggest concern is whether or not to post a video on Facebook?
I don't think we are going to get people to realize the dangers of the outside world until the outside world comes inside. And that is scary.
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