How Am I To Read The News?

Mostly I am very happy to rely on the work of others for the finding of news. You know, you post on facebook, I click your link and save it, I forget it was you who posted, I use your link in my Monday Links, I never actually share anything on Facebook, though sometimes on Twitter, I feel guilty, I resolve to share things on Facebook, I forget, and then something terrible happens and I end up on Huffpo reading this nonsense.

These two young people, I assume they are young, are engaged and planning a wedding. But they’re keeping Tinder so that they can find the occassional threesome to spice things up, because being young, gainfully employed, and in love isn’t enough any more. I adore this little redefinition of monogamy. One of them says,

Monogamy for me is all about partners putting each other’s needs and feelings at a high priority in their lives along with communication that keeps you both on the same page and allows you to make important decisions together. In that context, an open relationship or dating doesn’t really threaten our monogamy.

And the other one chimes in,

For me, I think Michael and I are pretty monogamous, even though we do have sex with people outside of our relationship. It still feels like a closed off relationship and very much our own.

Incidentally, I thought this little exchange was fascinating because over on twitter there’s some shouting about the fact that the police chief in Austin didn’t use the word terrorism to describe the horrifying bombing attacks over the last month. And then he described the bomber as a “very challenged young man” and many people pointed out, rightly, that young black men who perpetrate crimes are not described with the same generosity of spirit.

But I will confess to feeling sorry for the police chief, because I doubt he was trying to be bad. And I think the shifting and changing linguistic landscape is extremely fraught. Sometimes words are remarkably clear and are allowed to be used in their precise and most absolute sense. But other times, sometimes only a breath later, a word that heretofore did once have known meaning is suddenly subject to such redefinition that it comes to mean its exact opposite.

I love how the two young lovers search about in themselves for the meaning of the word. It means this for me, they say, head probably tilted to one side.

Everyone is out there trying to discover the meaning of things–their lives, their words, their feelings, their apps. Into this anarchical and unmoored linguistic landscape, some people wander and don’t have a way to come out. And so violence, ruin, and destruction–all words that are perfectly understandable–become our daily fare, the bread and butter of news and information.

What’s sad about this, is that the morning flip through the news is a increasingly a wasteland of expression. A drudgery. The two young people talking so openly about their sex lives is meant I think, in the same stroke of the keyboard to entice and shock, but also to lure the reader in by the softly prosaic ordinary tone. I, the reader, am meant to both be shocked and not shocked at all. But really, I am rather bored because such a manner of life seems both ghastly and depressing.

Similarly, when I go to read about the Austin Bomber, or Terrorist if you prefer, I must not just be grieved for the people he killed, for the bewilderment and horror his family must now be feeling, I must also be angry because the police chief did not appropriately virtue signal about black young men. The deep sorrow I might feel for the young bassist who was on his way to a life of music and promise is cheated and frittered away by twitter outrage.

It’s the perfect set up for Holy Week. The true, perfect, understandable Word came and was rejected. All the violence and rage of our human condition beat upon his person. But he did not abandon us. He did not let us win. He absorbed it all in himself to destroy it forever. What are those blissful words? Violence will no more be heard in your land, ruin or destruction within your boarders. You will call your walls, salvation, and all your portals, praise. Not with your head tilted to one side, searching within yourself to discover if it is so, scrolling through twitter, swiping right and left on tinder, but because Love Himself sought you out and made you irrevocably his.