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Wed. Mar 25, 2009

The Worst Days Of Our Lives, Or The Most Amazing?

Has it really been a month and a half since I posted here? I’d like to tell you that it’s due to twitter. If I have a passing thought I think is worth sharing, rather than flesh it out into a blog post, it gets edited to 140 characters or less. But twitter is only partially the cause.

Anything of note in the news lately has been too depressing or mad-making to bother writing about. As if you or anyone really needs my input anyway, when our media cup runneth over.

If you spend your time watching Fox News or CNN or MSNBC or CNBC or any of those other alarmist acronyms, well, you’d be hard pressed not to be depressed. When you have to fill 80% of the 1,440 minutes in each day with something that will make them watch the other 20%, well, you tell them “your nest egg is at immediate risk from sources you do not yet know … more after these commercials!” Or, “these are indeed the worst days of our lives … find out why after this break!”

As someone I know said on twitter, “Wife says that watching an entire family addicted to Heroin on Oprah is better than the news.”

The purveyors of gloom and doom are plentiful. And collecting a salary for it, as well. Keep in mind, that is their primary motivation. Not informing you. The goal is selling commercials, filling the remaining airtime with something sensational to hold those eyeballs, and collecting a check.

Tangentially, this is a very real reason we should all be worried about the fate of the newspaper industry. Because if we have to rely on the “cable journalists” to neutrally inform us of news events that impact our lives, and explain them in some detail, we are so very totally screwed.

But back to the economy. Now, don’t get me wrong. I know things truly are bad in many ways. I know people who’ve been laid off from their jobs due to the shrinking economy. I’m married to one. We’re both working freelance now, and I’ve watched my freelance business suffer some dips and swings over the past six months.

But let there be no doubt there are those who would profit from your fear, by magnifying it. And there are others simply grasping at straws, like Peggy Noonan, who thinks “There’s No Pill for This Kind of Depression.”

She thinks “the economy isn’t the only reason for our unease. There’s more to it. People sense something slipping away, a world receding, not only an economic one but a world of old structures, old ways and assumptions. People don’t talk about this much because it’s too big…”

Peggy, you need to go watch comedian Louie CK’s appearance on Conan O’Brien’s show. It’s well worth watching all 4:12 of it, but here’s a quick rough transcription of a couple of parts of it, so you get the flavor:

Everything is amazing right now, and nobody is happy. The changes in my lifetime in the world have been incredible. When I was a kid we had a rotary phone, you had to stand right next to it to call someone, and it was so primitive, you dial it and you’re making sparks … If someone called and you weren’t home, it would just ring.

If you needed money, you had to go into the bank. You had to stand in line and write a check to yourself, like an idiot, and when you ran out of money, you’d go, well, I guess I can’t do any more things now. I’m out of money.

I was on an airplane the other day, and there was high speed internet, the newest thing there is, and it’s great, I’m surfing the web, watching YouTube videos, it’s amazing. And then it breaks down, and they apologize. And the guy next to me says, “this is bullshit.” Like, how quickly the world owes him something that he just found out about ten seconds ago.

Go watch the whole thing. Very funny. And all good humor has an underlying nugget of truth.

We forget how good we’ve got it. My grandfather was born into a world with no airplanes, very few automobiles, and electricity in your home was talked about the way we talk about flying cars. As a child, during the tail end of the depression, my Dad flipped the first light switch in their home. Later, he took produce into town driving a donkey and cart on a dirt path that is today a four lane highway. Then there’s me; I telecommute. I drive a desktop, a laptop, and an iPhone. Were my grandfather still alive, he would understand none of these things, yet we are only two generations apart.

We live in the most amazing times.

This thought flashed in my mind just the other day, as I performed what is now a simple and regular act. I was doing a photo for a client, and had received an email with some requested changes. I went back to the set, and then realized I’d forgotten one thing. So I went back to my computer, and grabbed the flash memory card.

As I did, it flashed across my mind, I’d just picked up a piece of plastic less than one inch square, which contained 4.7 times more memory than the entire hard drive on my first computer (a 4GB card versus an 850MB hard drive). Furthermore, a mere ten years ago, my simple task would have been so much more complex and time consuming.

I would have had to shoot with a 4×5 view camera for the resolution needed, which means loading film in holders, exposing them, taking them to the lab, waiting two hours for them to be processed … and then you could deliver it to the client. Physically delivered, that is, not digitally shipped like today. Emailed directions for changes? Forget it, you had to shoot a Polaroid that another human had to physically hold to view, and direct changes.

That boost in productivity in a mere decade is amazing. Conservatively, I estimate it would take me three times as long to complete the shot (i.e., earn the same amount of money) doing it “Ye Olde Way.” I haven’t set foot in a darkroom in six years. If I had to go back to Ye Olde Way, frankly, it would be pretty depressing.

What’s that on the floor, a straw to grasp? Go for it, Peggy:

The sale of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs is widespread. In New York their use became common after 9/11. It continued through and, I hypothesize, may have contributed to, the high-flying, wildly imprudent Wall Street of the ’00s. We look for reasons for the crash and there are many, but I wonder if Xanax, Zoloft and Klonopin, when taken by investment bankers, lessened what might have been normal, prudent anxiety, or helped confuse prudent anxiety with baseless, free-floating fear. Maybe Wall Street was high as a kite and didn’t notice. Maybe that would explain Bear Stearns, and Merrill, and Citi.

While I will be the first to agree that we never ever should have allowed pharmaceutical companies to advertise their wares on TV, I have to say, when it comes to grasping at straws, this one is so insignificant you need an electron microscope to grasp it.

Yeah, it was the drugs. Perhaps as a part of the stimulus package, we can include a dirt-cheap recycled “Just Say No” campaign to make things better.

Now, why are some people depressed? “I feel utterly powerless to do anything about the fellow in the Oval Office who combines infantile leftism and adolescent grandiosity in roughly equal measures. It seems to me that every day he is responsible for assaults on the freedom and well being of the American people. I can’t keep up and I can’t stand to pay attention.”

This sounds like an echo with a four year delay. If you replaced “infantile leftism” with, say, “neocon idiocy,” then you’d have an archive from DailyKos, circa spring 2005.

I understand political disappointment, but how does one explain the literal blubbering mess Glenn Beck has become? David Frum asks WHAT IS GOING ON AT FOX NEWS?, and then quotes another of Beck’s tirades:

We are a country that is headed towards socialism, totalitarianism, beyond your wildest dreams. I have to tell you: I’m doing a story tonight that I wanted to debunk — these FEMA camps — I’m tired of hearing about them — you know about them? I wanted to debunk them. We’ve now for several days done research on them. I can’t debunk them!

Oh, Good Lord, it’s the old FEMA Camps story. Listen, if someone told me the Girl Scouts of America were going to be running detention camps, I’d be worried. Because they are an organization capable of delivering a box of Thin Mints or Do-Si-Dos to every home in America.

But FEMA? C’mon! The only way I’d be afraid of them is if they were trying to deliver help to me when I really needed it. I’d be scared to death.

This FEMA camps rumor has been around perhaps a couple of years, and was most recently brought up to me last September … as a device Obama would be using when he was elected President. I was forced to ask, “why would the Bush administration be building these camps today for Obama to use next year?” There’s zero logic behind the rumor, just fear. So it gets repeated by those who wish to use that.

Then there are those shipping sarcasm Obama’s way because he
allegedly mispronounced Cassiopeia (in a country where I would wager 85% of adults do not even know what Cassiopeia is), the same people who gladly stood up for a man whose mangled syntax was nonpareil.

Because that kind of stuff is important, you know.

Two months in, we’ve seen Obama called a socialist, even a communist and a fascist, in fact, some even bring up Hitler (ignoring Godwin’s Law). Some say “We’ve got trash in the White House.” Frankly, it’s as if some people have lost their minds (and their memory).

I know it has likely been more than 20 years since we’ve had a President that the opposing party didn’t try to tear down. But to get to “Hitler” and “trash” in two months? What have we become?

A nation that cannot agree on a solution. Ever. To anything.

So, that’s why it’s been some time since I felt like commenting on any of this. Because while there are Real World things to be upset about, there is so much more that seems ginned up, or perhaps some kind of political genetics (symptom: uncontrollable knee-jerking), or simply irrelevant (mispronouncing star names?). And even if you could come up with a solution that would place “a chicken in every pot,” there would be those who say that chicken is a poisonous attempt to subvert us all for shadowy political reasons.

Listen, I know people are worried that some as yet unseen catastrophic financial event is going to take them out. But this is true every day of your life.

Or every night, as the case may be. About two months ago, I was preparing to go to bed about 3am (yes, I’m a nightowl), and when I turned off the sound making electronics, I heard a faint beeping sound. I tracked it down, and it turned out it was the fire alarm in the condo below me. With no one answering the door, I had to call 911 and pray the fire department got there in time. Which they did, but I had enough time to think about “catastrophic financial event” from a whole other perspective.

Tangent: this is another example of twitter killing blogs. What normally might have been a somewhat entertaining blog post from me was instead spun out (starting at 4:10am) as … a … series … of … twitters.

Now, Susan and I did spend some time worrying … what if this guy does it again, and we’re not so lucky? It’s easy to think about the consequences, but literally impossible to prevent them. And at some point, you have to let go of it. It’s beyond your control, at that point in time.

I hate to close by getting all Zen on you, but, for frak’s sake, be here now. If you spend your time worrying about the investments you should/shouldn’t have made, that day you turned down the job you now wish you had, or other events in the past, you are expending precious mental energy on something you cannot change: the past.

If you spend your energy worrying about the choices you may (or may not) have to make next week or next month, it’s the same thing; you cannot do anything about that unknown future at this moment.

But by worrying about the past or the future, you can sure as hell ruin today. Today is all we have. Tomorrow may bring a storm, or sunshine. Tonight there maybe a fire, or 8 hours of uninterrupted peace. We cannot know.

Oh, sure, there’s lots who will be glad to make a prediction for you … right after this commercial break! But, for your own sake, ignore them. Do the best you can do each day. And do your best to enjoy each day.

You only get so many.