Watching the World Wrecking
&quot; I have trained myself to ignore the news, or rather I have trained myself to think I can ignore the news, or rather I thought news can ignore me and we both can mutually agree on ignoring without even temporarily igniting the interest or a glimpse of it towards each another.&quot;<p>and then:<p>&quot;But now, a real war... A war, aggression, a direct invasion is something my consciousness cannot ignore. It devours all my attention, all my thoughts, all my emotions and feelings – everything.&quot;<p>&quot;Pain because of all countless stories, photos, videos, and live TikToks of destroyed cities and injured people, shootings, shoutings, explosions. Pain because I have friends from and in Ukraine. They tell me stories about their families and other people hiding in the undergrounds and basements, or desperately trying to leave their country, without food, shelter, or medicine.&quot;<p>There was always stuff to be scared of on the news.  But from his perspective, what&#x27;s changed?  He still doesn&#x27;t have any personal experience of this war, any more than he had of the previous stories he saw or ignored.<p>What&#x27;s happened is that he is bought into it, because of the scale of what is being presented to him on screens.<p>There are other wars, but somehow those are&#x2F;were possible to ignore (eg Yemen, Afganistan, Iraq, Ukraine pre-2022, etc).  Eg apparently 97 people were killed in Iraq last month: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;original.antiwar.com&#x2F;updates&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;iraq-monthly-roundup-97-killed-during-march&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;original.antiwar.com&#x2F;updates&#x2F;2022&#x2F;03&#x2F;31&#x2F;iraq-monthly...</a> ... but this is NOT news.<p>This war is only special because the media are putting it in our faces.  The media is a part of this - they are playing a role.  Their role is to increase fear, by bringing our attention to this all the time.  It is likely to me that the media reaction plays a role in pushing people to do something - sign up to fight, flee their homes, etc.<p>I don&#x27;t trust the media nor what is presented.  I&#x27;d like to understand better why this war is sucking in all the air, and why we have this being presented to us.  I expect that the mass co-ordination of the media in promoting this story, at this time (immediately after covid) indicates that we are being manipulated.