World news seems to be especially bad at the moment. Slaughter is seen as a very good thing (depending on your narrative). Plus ca change. But I have some very local news to report. I’ve had a barometer for about 15 years and it has never before hit rock bottom (not a meteorological term I know). The needle is stuck as far as it can go on the low pressure side. Perhaps it’s just got tired of the third named storm in as many weeks (I know I am). So what is the relationship between what is dominating our awful news at the moment and the actual unprecedented behaviour of my barometer? It is simply that parochial human horror stories, which we create for ourselves will always serve as a distraction activity when the big, global catastrophe lurks ever larger on the scene. It tells us a lot about how actually useless our collective human survival instinct really is. What I wonder is Hamas’s policy on climate change? Are their tunnels flood proof? I only pick on Hamas because they're in the news.
The parochial and personal always trumps the global (if only people really did act on ‘think global act local’). It is of course entirely predictable that parochialisms tend to outdo each other for our attention when the elephant in the room is the proverbial unseen beast (poor elephants). So for example poor old Ukraine has been knocked off the news perch - the ill-defined 'care' of the 'news' has moved on. I’m beginning to wonder whether Baudrillard was right. I’ll rest on that possibility. And in the meantime I would really like my barometer's needle to swing swiftly to the right.
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