I spent the week around Thanksgiving without a regular News feed.  As I’ve gotten older the amount of news I watch and read has increased.  I should clarify that… News and Commentary.  As I’ve gotten older, my stress level has also increased, and as my wife will point out, my mood has generally worsened.

While I didn’t notice it, when we came back from Thanksgiving in Florida my wife pointed out that I seemed to be a better mood overall.  I didn’t think much of it until a few days later I realized I had turned off the news, and only briefly glanced at the news sites.

This got me thinking.  It’s easy for me to accept that my mood worsens when I’m worried about world event, politics, and the like.  But even that week without news did create a slight new stress for me: I don’t like being ignorant.  It also pointed out two things that make me distraught all over again.

1) It’s easy to be happy when you don’t know what’s going on, but not knowing what is going on is how tyranny makes headway.  I wasn’t worried about the things that worried me the week before because I wasn’t up to date and informed.  While I liked not worrying, it’s the worrying that is necessary to keep tyranny and evil at bay.  (Yes, Evil!).  I think that’s why people don’t care about how corrupt our government has become.  I think too many tune out… and who can blame them, who wants to be stressed?

2) Even in a “newsless” situation, I caught some news items, but they weren’t important.  One news story sticks out: The Tiger Woods story.  Of the news that was “forced” on me in my news blackout, that bit of pop culture crap abounded.  I find this ridiculous and sad. I *really* don’t care about Tiger except that it’s sad that somebody who so many people looked up to has let people down.  To me, that was a news story that shouldn’t have gone past a 24 hour news cycle.

For me, Pandora’s box has been opened, and even though I can take a few days off of “the real world”, ultimately I start feeling worse that I’m out of the loop.  Ignorance is bliss for me only for a few days.  I guess it’s lke a vacation, eventually you will likely *want* to come back.  Or maybe I’m just crazy.

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