Charley Reese Weighs in on "Crime and Trivia"

King Features Syndicate, Inc. ^ | 10-27-03 | Reese, Charley

[Theodore R.]

Crime And Trivia

I haven't written about the Laci Peterson murder case or the rape case involving Kobe Bryant for two reasons.

One, the only things that should be legitimately reported about any criminal trial are the testimony of the witnesses under oath and the remarks of the judge and the attorneys inside the courtroom during the trial. Everything else is hearsay and gossip.

Two, an ordinary crime and subsequent criminal trial do not affect anyone except the victim, the perpetrator and their families. Therefore, it should be of no interest to anyone else. Unless you are family or friend, the outcomes of the two trials I mentioned will have no effect on you whatsoever.

It's hard to get this message across to young people, but life is short. It is foolish to waste your life on trivial matters. Benjamin Franklin had a rule for his newspaper. Unless the information was useful or entertaining, it didn't get in. Alas, that is no longer the standard in today's world, so each of us has to do our own editing.

You edit by ignoring information that is neither useful nor entertaining. In print publications, that's easy. You just scan the headlines and skip the stories that are neither useful nor entertaining. With television, you have to use your on-off switch.

I personally don't give a hoot how those two trials come out or if Ben Affleck and what's-her-name get married. Since I'm not an investor in Hollywood, I don't care what the box-office gross is for a movie or who wins any of the trade awards. I'm not interested in any entertainment news, which is all gossip or commercial hype. Unless there is some inspiring story of heroism, I'm not interested in random accidents and natural disasters that occur far away. Or distant wars, for that matter.

Although I admire former California Gov. Jerry Brown, I think he's wrong to advise people to "think globally, act locally." The fact is that thinking globally is pointless, and nothing we do locally is going to affect the outcome in distant places. For example, the only people who can "save the Brazilian rain forests" are the Brazilians. It's their forest and their country. Whether we think the Chinese should have built a dam on the Yangtze River is a moot point. It's their river, and they've built a dam.

The fact is, our country is in no great shape, and we should be minding our own affairs. We should concentrate on our families, our neighborhoods, our communities, our states and our regions. That is enough geography for any human being to be concerned about. Within our own regions are sufficient numbers of problems — human, social, governmental and environmental — to keep us all busy.

Most of us have to work a third of our day to sustain our survival during the other two-thirds. When you subtract time consumed by traveling to and from work and by the necessary housekeeping duties, then there is not a heck of a lot of time left for saving the world. We might better spend our time giving attention to our own children — attention that a child craves like oxygen.

I hate seeing children dumped into day-care centers while their parents work at underpaid jobs for giant corporations that don't give a damn about them or their children. Unemployment, underemployment and people working for unlivable wages are an economic blight that should concern all Americans.

There are many problems we should be working on instead of allowing ourselves to be distracted by the monstrous media/entertainment corporate goliath, as well as silly internationalists who hide behind a false humanity while trying to get their hands on other people's resources.

What we need are more feisty, engaged Americans rather than TV-induced zombies. I want to see more Americans like a lady in Kansas who decades ago said, "We've got to stop raising corn and start raising hell." Amen, sister, amen.

© 2003 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

[Theodore R.]

I want to see more Americans like a lady in Kansas who decades ago said, "We've got to stop raising corn and start raising hell." Amen, sister, amen.

That was Mary E. "Mother" Lease.

[robertpaulsen]

I was going to read this article, but then I decided that it wasn't useful or entertaining.

[gcruse]

Actually, the old Loon has some good points. I started changing channels at the first sign of Laci and Kobe long ago, and thinking globally is imperialism in Birkenstocks. Life is longer than Charley says, though, and we can't think ennobling thoughts all the time. Now, back to porn surfing...