Pay attention to world events. On the morning of September 11th I awoke from a disturbing dream. I was on a ship that was on fire. The Captain was dying of a heart attack and some young people, former students I had taught in New York, were asking me for help. Since I taught in New York for 14 years, the odds are that some of my former students died on 9/11.
When I woke up, still having heard nothing of the tragedy, but disturbed by the dream, I picked a card from the Zap Oracle and got this one, which was already captioned, "Pay Attention to World Events."
It is one thing to consciously abstain from fear-based news media; it is quite another to be ignorant of the world out of laziness and neglect. As Thomas Jefferson said, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." If you are not paying attention to world events, you are not being vigilant.
Another rationalization people commonly use to excuse their inattention to current events: "The media is all corporate-controlled propaganda." There are plenty of non corporate-controlled news sources out there, some of them excellent. But in my experience, those who scorn the corporate-controlled news media tend to gravitate toward the lowest quality of alternative news media, and their world view tends to be a pastiche of paranoid urban legends and the fever dreams of conspiracy theorists. A person who only watched corporate-controlled media (excepting Fox News) would actually end up far better informed.
|