ALL NEWS IS LOCAL
My latest PJ Media column is up. It’s about what’s going on in my little community of Algonquin and how for my neighbors, that kind of news trumps what’s going on in the rest of the world.
A sample:
The Internet is truly a seductive place. It is the 18-year-old blond hard body with legs that don’t quit, swishing through a lunchtime crowd of 40-something paunched, balding, married men wishing they didn’t have two kids, a wife with a headache every night, and a mortgage to rival the national debt. With a flick of her hip, the seductress will whisk them all away to some place where they don’t have to pick up the dry cleaning on the way home from work or take the kid to soccer practice. Instead, our middle-aged Lotharios imagine themselves… (Insert current fantasy here.)
The Internet does that, of course. It seduces our senses, placing us smack in the middle of history, a “This is London,†Murrowesque reality on steroids where we can change the scenery simply by clicking the mouse. To those of us who grew up in a world where the grainy, black and white images of far away places were broadcast on one of only three television networks, it truly is magic – something those who have lived with the sorcery for most of their lives will never understand.
Look on the front page of the PJM website and what do you see? Articles from writers based in Paris, Baghdad, Copenhagen, Tokyo, Islamabad, Tel Aviv, and all the important, vital datelines here in the US; New York, Washington, D.C., and anywhere a presidential candidate sneezes. When I was young, jets were still a novelty. But who needs airplanes when you can use the Net to beam yourself wherever you want to go?
Getting caught up in earth-shaking events and the personalities that shape them is all well and good. But there are times when instead of peering at the monitor, gleaning the latest news from thousands of miles away, we should be looking out the window instead. What’s going on in your community? Your neighborhood? Next door?
All News Is Local…
PJM Algonquin, Illinois: Seductive as following world news on the Internet may be, you’ve still got to know what’s going on in your own backyard, writes Rick Moran…….
Trackback by Pajamas Media — 9/20/2007 @ 7:28 am
Meanwhile in other news relating to your comments about married men I saw today on the web some commentary about how guys were deserting the 30 something ladies in the peak of their sexual prime for younger gals.
Heck I thought that was always the premise supposed to be reserved for dirty old men.
Well I am now at the age of a dirty old man and I don’t lust for the teen gals, but now the 30 somethings could be a different story.
But that’s just my take on the issue.
Oh and I am not being a cheater here, I am a widower.
Comment by SlimGuy — 9/21/2007 @ 2:59 am
If you read the Daily Herald’s series on school finance, you might change your mind a bit about the adequacy of educational funding.
Comment by Cal Skinner — 9/24/2007 @ 8:27 pm