An email went round work last week announcing that we were going to be having a minute’s silence for the victims of the Tunisian beach attack. As it happens everyone forgot when the time came but it brought up an interesting point.
I didn’t really know about it.
People were shocked, but it just had not entered my radar. I hadn’t seen the news and while there were probably some references to it, perhaps in conversation or on Facebook, I had just filtered them out.
I have gone through periods of my life where I thought it was really important to read the news. I would diligently check BBC News every day to find out what was going on in the world.
I have also gone through periods, such as now, where I just do not read the news. Why? Because it is generally full of unfortunate things happening to people. In fact, it is almost exclusively full of that.
It is extremely sad that those people died in Tunisia. In some ways it is an odd story to focus on. 50,000 people died of a preventable cause yesterday. That is 30 just during the minute’s silence. That isn’t in the news.
Similarly a story such as this might put people off from travelling to Tunisia. However, statistically the most likely way for me to die if I was to go there for a holiday, would be as it always is – in a car crash travelling to or from the airport.
It feels an odd thing to admit to being not just ignorant of something, but wilfully ignorant of it. However, my life does not seem to be much affected by my screening out of the non-stop string of mongering and negative news reporting that the media engages in, so it is hard to see how I am not better off without it.
Don't have time to check my blog? Get a weekly email with all the new posts. This is my personal blog, so obviously it is 100% spam free.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2015 at 11:15 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.