How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb
It happened unconsciously somewhere in the recent past, but for a while now I have been ignoring traditional media. Ignoring is not the right word: it implies an active deed on my part, but it is nothing like that. Somehow, traditional media just lost me, or I lost traditional media. Newspapers, television broadcasts, they are just no part of my life anymore. Somehow, they have vanished. Gone over the horizon. And it has been an improvement, to say the least.
Sometimes, I hear people talking about ‘the news’. Stuff that happens miles and miles away. I remember the days I used to care about all the injustice in the world. The troubled days, I must add. It was such a burden. Today, I hear something about a revolution here, an oil-spill there, but it has no meaning anymore. I can let it pass without getting worked up over it. As long as there is no oil on my doorstep, how does it influence me?
Even though I live next door to the Dutch parliament, the political arena is reduced to a virtual reality. An amusement show that has no bearing on my self. No matter what they do, what they decide, I will always be me. Wilders, a demon to some, a saviour to others, is merely a clown on the stage of this comedy. He does not bother me. Is not real.
It may come across as a little ego-centric, to say the least. But stop and think, the reverse is actually true! Who am I to think that all those far-away injustices concern me. Who am I to think I have anything to do with it, that I somehow have a role in bringing about, changing or correcting those circumstances. How ego-centric is that??
The important news will come to me anyway, through the people I know. The real world that surrounds me. And then I will be able to act, to change reality. That which I cannot change is not a part of my reality. And that which I change, is my reality. Always and constantly.
I perceive, I act, I change.
I have no past, no future, just the here and now.
