This Post Could Be the Last Post You Will Ever Read

I hope not, but this post could be the last one you will ever read. It is possible and if my media feed is any indication, what is possible is now probable if it is one of the worst conceivable outcomes. It is very possible that this will be the last post I ever write or the last post you ever read.

I am sorry.

While this is true, it is unlikely. I am in good health, but more importantly, there are many of you (Mom, Dad, and Uncle Bob) and the odds of this being the last post all of you read is very, very small. Why lead with the scary heading? Why not: A Brief Thought on Probability and News”?

Bad news has always sold (“If it bleeds, it leads.) and freakish oddities have always attracted attention (Man bites dog!). Sadly for news, there are only so many men biting dogs or horrific news items a day, yet there is time to fill in 24 hour news consumption. How do we get people to notice us and click on our site?

The good news for those selling clicks to us is that there is a potential infinite number of possible stories and many of them are HORRIFIC. It is possible I will get hit by a falling bit of space debris, an asteroid could smite the Earth, or both. We stand on the edge of POSSIBLE Armageddon every day.

A few things are impossible, 2+2 will never be 5, and a good many more are so implausible that even if they are logically possible, still nobody would believe in them. It is possible that sea monkeys are actually alien life forms here to make us all their slaves, but nobody will click on your link if you claim it except for Alex Jones.

Instead, if news sites wish to stand out, they need something horrible, possible, and that seems at least a little likely, even if it has not happened yet: alligators are in your pipes, Obama is planning a coup, Trump is already an autocrat, or  Samantha Bee will be witty.

Combine the panic over the possible with the Superhero Syndrome and problems multiply.

Lazy storytelling relies on bigger and badder the way JJ Abrams relies on Star Trek: the Original Series for stories and special effects for novelty. In the Superhero Syndrome the hero starts faster than a speeding bullet, but soon that is too slow to grab our attention. Superman can fly as fast as a jet! Later, Superman can fly as fast as the speed of light and soon Superman flies so quickly that distance is annihilated as is coherence.If you save the city, next you must save the nation, tomorrow the world, and finally the cosmos. What’s next? Reboot the series.

Whatever the problems this brings to fiction, the combination of looking for the possible bad news and a need for bigly is toxic to our happiness. We used to have “insert scandal”-gate, but now we have “Unprecedented in the History of the Republic.”

Things are so bad, evidently, that the American Civil War is nothing. My grandparents faced the Great Depression, Stalin, Hitler, FDR rocking along for four terms, and a nation that had institutionalized racial apartheid, but nothing is worse than what Trump is doing now. 

This is stupid.

We had a Vice-President who shot and killed a founding father in a dual and then we made a musical out of it. This is the American Way, not panicked headlines that “we have never been so divided.”

Bannon is bad, but Woodrow Wilson was a proud racist, incompetent globalist, and stayed in office while incapacitated.  We should get rid of Bannonism (it is a cancer on this administration), but we need to get historic perspective. This does not mean that we should not act, condemn bad stuff, and be strong . . . just that exaggerating for profit is unseemly and bad for our souls. 

We cannot live at full rage and lies are bad even in good causes. When someone says: “We have never had a bigger or more abrupt transition than the one from Obama to Trump . . . they must be forgetting Buchanan to Lincoln or even Carter to Reagan.”

My dad has given our family advice for these days: “Be calm and stand firm.” We do not like everything happening in our nation or the world. That is not new. Let’s fight the bad, praise the good, and love our neighbor.

Stand firm. Be calm.