The Media Divides Us Through our Innate Morbid Curiosity

Every day, mainstream news outlets and social media feeds bombard us with imagery that tickles our conflict bone.  Stories of cruelty, murder, hate and lost innocence greatly outweigh stories of inspiration and goodwill.  As human beings, most of us cannot help but engage in these articles that give us a look into the dark sides of humanity where humans inflict pain and suffering on their fellow man, animals or themselves.    

There is a Law and Order SVU episode, I believe it is titled "Specticle". In this episode, a girls assault was going to be broadcast over the internet once the viewer count reached a certain threshold.  Through the media, police urged people to stay off of the website as this girl's life may depend on it.   As you can probably guess, even with a persons life on the line, all of the attention given to this situation caused the website to become flooded with viewers and the minimum view threshold had by far been met.  Life imitates art and art imitates life, although this situation is from a fictional TV series, I am confident that the same exact result would occur in reality. 


Most people do not have the willpower to ignore/suppress their morbid curiosity.  This is why we still have traffic jams caused by people who want to break their necks to see a car with a flat tire on the side of the road.  This is why you are more likely to see 100 people recording an assault with their phones yet not one of them will actually help the person being assaulted.  What makes it worse is that there are always troubled individuals desperately searching for a way to get attention, a way to get into a spotlight that is all dependent on the human races seemingly innate need for violence and conflict, which our government and media exploits.  Today, all over the news, all over social media, all you see is stories of school shootings, stories of racism, sexism, discrimination and hatred on all levels, with nearly every solution pointing to some kind of government regulation that is supposed to fix these problems; don't you see that we are being played for fools?  Our problems can not be solved by giving control to someone else ( especially not a government filled with out of touch, greedy and corruptible people), our problems get solved when we accept responsibility for our role in the bigger picture and take control within yourself to make a change!


Believe it or not, good things happen in the world too.  If you stay attached to mainstream news and social media then you will always be fed fear, hate and judgment on a conscious and unconscious level.  If we always focus on the negative then we will almost always have negativity surrounding us.  The change starts with us as individuals, as friends, as family members and as members of our societies.  Today and everyday, be better to yourself, be better to everyone in your life and be grateful for what you have; there is always someone that is grateful having far less than you do.

 

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