I’m sure if you’ve turned on the TV, listened to the radio, or come across one of those ancient things they call a newspaper (ask your Grandma) in the past year, you’ve undoubtedly heard or seen some pretty heinous acts. Whether it’s Newtown Connecticut, the Boston Marathon, campus stabbings, bombings in Iraq, Brad Paisley and LL Cool J collaborating, North Korea losing its mind, etc., it would seem the world is in a pretty dark place. With these topics dominating headlines (which to be fair, they probably should), it’s difficult to form any positive outlook on the world we live in.
In the aftermath of these tragedies, people are quick to find scapegoats. Oh it’s this lack of gun control, or it’s because we don’t have enough guns, or it’s the video games, or the movies, or his mom didn’t breastfeed him, or his mom breastfed him until he was 17. For those of you who don’t want guns as part of your world, get real, they aren’t going anywhere. For those of you calling for more guns, you need to also get real. You don’t need a damn bazooka and an armory that would rival an African nation. For those that want to blame video games, you clearly don’t play or understand video games. Video games don’t make you want to go out and shoot someone, they make you want to play more video games. For those of you still being breastfed at 17, I really don’t have a response for you, that’s um, pretty gross, you should probably stop that. We fight each other over these very topics, losing sight of who we really are, and what we’re really fighting against.
It’s very easy to find yourself cursing the human race, to wonder how anyone is capable of so much hatred to lash out and cause so much pain and suffering. When something of this magnitude happens, it’s important to remember that it’s the action of one evil person, or a small fraction of the world’s population. The overwhelming majority are decent people, taking it one day at a time, the same as you. Why should we judge the entire human race, on the acts of a few evil, mentally ill individuals?
It all makes you stop and think, if that’s possible in today’s time, just what are we doing here? What really matters? How is what we do going to help anything? How do things like sporting events, Fast and the Furious movies, the great Chuck Norris (which are all enjoyed by the masses), and The Jivewater News (which is enjoyed by like 4 people) serve any real purpose? Okay, fine, I’ll give you Chuck Norris, that was a bad example. Chuck Norris’ beard is probably going to come roundhouse kick me in the face while I sleep tonight, just for suggesting that. But the point is, while these are all things we enjoy, they all seem trivial and inconsequential compared to the constant barrage of bad news on a daily basis.
I don’t watch the news. Don’t want to or try to. I keep up with world events, but can’t stand watching all the negativity, it’s too depressing. The local news variety usually takes 30 minutes to endure. Of that 30 minutes, 22 minutes constitute news airtime and the other 8 minutes are commercials for that sketchy looking dealership out in Portsmouth, where I’m pretty sure, if you were to buy a car from them, that sumbitch would be broken down before you got back across the line to Chesapeake. The first 5 minutes is always about someone getting murdered, stabbed, raped, robbed, or all of the above, in what the anchors are calling Nor-Folk. I must say I’ve never been to this Nor-Folk, but it’s not sounding too pleasant. Another 5 minutes is the weatherman telling you there’s a 50% chance it won’t rain tomorrow, or was it 50% chance it will rain? (Dammit, we missed it Charlene, why do you have to talk on the phone in here when the damn news is on, you know I’m trying to hear the weather, I swear you do that shit on purpose!) That leaves 3 minutes for the sports guy to babble on about some minor league team that I’m pretty sure the actual players on the team don’t even care about. If your math is good (which if you’re a FHS grad after 2005, I’m sure it isn’t), that’s about 9 minutes or so, of what I’d like to call filler. Typically this time is used to show interviews with the people who didn’t have sense enough to not talk to the news crew. They usually are wearing a T-shirt of a defunct sports team, or something from the Miami Hurricanes circa 1988, which for normal people, would be worn as a form of nostalgia or irony, but in this case, I think its safe to assume the participants have no clue the team no longer exists. They also lack in dental hygiene, and they almost certainly are always sitting in a vehicle with the window half cracked. It’s like they saw the news camera, drove up to them, and demanded they be interviewed. To be fair, if you are the one controlling the camera, you have to keep rolling here, you just never know when you’ll have the next Youtube sensation on your hands. After the filler, if you’re lucky, the news will sign off with an animal doing something cute. I guess this is to get the taste of shit out of your mouth. (You know, kinda like Olive Garden does when they give you mints after your meal.) So that’s 21 minutes and 30 seconds of bad things, and that’s just what happened today.
I realize an article like this is quite out of character for us. With this site attempting (often failing) to be a humor site, topics like real world events very rarely make it to our page. There is simply no humor to be gleaned from these despicable acts, and the fallout from them, including but not exclusively, the gun control debate is just too divisive of a subject to delve into, and personally, I don’t find the debate humorous at all. On subjects such as these, it’s difficult to crack a smile, much less have a laugh. In these instances, humor, and things like this website are quite trivial. With that said, I hope that you came to this site today, or any other day, cold Bud Light, or Diet Coke in hand, to look for a laugh and to just get away for a few minutes from the real world. For in that moment, things such as sports, movies, Chuck Norris, and even The Jivewater News all matter, as that’s why we’re all here. We won’t take away the pain in the world, but maybe for a minute, we can take it off your mind.
Thanks for reading.
Senior Editor