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A Little Light, Please

Her head pounds. Her body aches. Her nose runs and her eyes water. The day is long. She reads a book. She finishes the book. She emails. She Facebooks. She reads blogs. She blows her nose. A lot.

The next day is the same, so is the one after that.

As she lies there, she thinks about all the images and words she's consumed over the past 72 hours: a starlet off to prison, a dishonest businessman, a dozen trapped miners deep underground, a challenged book. This is news. This is entertainment. They are one and the same.

An acorn hits her roof. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk. It rolls down, picking up speed before it hurtles over the edge.

Why is it, she wonders, that the media feeds us darkness, when there is light yet to be had? Why do they glorify the hopeless, the hellbound, the dark, the demon, the despair? Why has the world been populated entirely with vampires and zombies and werewolves? Why is pop culture stuck on murders and mayhem, or the sexually scintillating? What happened to Donna Reed? Where is Fred Astaire when you need him?

Is this really what society thinks of as entertainment? She wonders what her great-grandparents would think--they who were professional entertainers, the stock of Vaudeville. Isn't there anything better than this?

She's thankful that colds only last an average of ten days. Not too much longer before she can return to her regularly scheduled programming.

Comments

  1. Ginger JohnsonSeptember 25, 2010 at 11:42 AM

    Perhaps I will be accused of being Pollyanna, but I, for one, would appreciate a little balance.

    ReplyDelete

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