If there ever was an overused phrase in today’s media, it is “breaking news.”
I’m not a journalist, but my sense is that it is meant to endow just about anything coming in excess of the telly or social media with an immediacy that is breathtaking. It is transmitted by the newsgirl, who catches the guys’ awareness with the looks of a product, providing the most current gaffe or brilliant analysis manufactured by the president as he hurries to board a Maritime helicopter to his up coming critical (all presidential conferences are crucial) meeting.
20-four-hour information channels of all styles have to produce breaking news normally to preserve the listeners and viewers, at the extremely least, sentient.
Sentient, by the way, according to my old standby, Merriam-Webster’s is “ability to understand or experience factors.” By the close of seeing a prolonged news cycle, I am usually losing my sentience and slipping into ennui, sensation very little about what is coming through the tube.
Have not I read all this ahead of? How quite a few methods can we dissect the Communist party’s dictatorship in Cuba, the collapse of governing administration in Afghanistan, no matter whether kindergartners ought to don masks?
Or, what about something else [hardly] new, like the important race concept? Or the mothers and fathers at the conference of the nearby college board of Someplace, Usa demanding academics and their unions prevent educating their young children that they are possibly dominating racists or victimized people today of coloration?
Even so, I find myself drawn to information from Cuba and Haiti. I worked in Cuba on numerous occasions and visited Haiti the moment in 1965 when less than the routine of Papa Doc Duvalier, a notorious dictator who ruled the island as a result of concern and intimidation.
I still can listen to the drumbeats of the Voodoo-driven Ton Ton Macoute drifting down from the dim mountains as we approached the island in the tumble of 1965 at night, standing offshore right until morning to enter the port of the funds city of Port au Prince. We introduced “People to People” supplies in, the predecessors of Aid packages, and had been the first U.S. Navy ship to visit the island in years because of the embargo in area versus the dictatorship of Duvalier.
I was not prepared for the slums surrounding our ship as we docked. People residing cheek-by-jowl with chickens and animals in wooden sheds that handed for homes, smoke curling up from cooking fires.
This was the only port we visited in two a long time of cruising in the Caribbean and Mediterranean where by officers had to dress in uniforms when going ashore on “shore depart.” Liberty was for enlisted males. I felt like a time-traveler from an additional planet.
“The whole of Haiti,” I recalled in my diary, “is poverty-stricken beyond belief. We brought some individuals-to-people things in but the dent it manufactured was nil at finest.”
Even as a fairly callow younger American, I was dumbstruck. “From our clean up decks and spotless dwelling quarters, via binoculars, we could see the men and girls and little ones wander out of their thatched huts and hovels to urinate and defecate with their animals in the porches, whatever the squalid open sites all around their shelters can be named.”
We only spent one particular evening in Port au Prince and stood out to sea the future day to return to our homeport of Minor Creek, Virginia, following possessing invested 3 months in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in refresher education before Haiti.
A month or two back, the president of Haiti was assassinated, and earlier this month a monster earthquake smashed the island to its knees again, leaving hundreds, possibly hundreds, useless and homeless. Then, soon after a couple of days, Haiti slipped absent from “breaking information,” to be replaced by Afghans storming U. S. plane in Kabul making an attempt to escape the Taliban, reminiscent of the drop of Saigon in 1975.
And just lately I was reunited with issues Cuban. Two younger Cubans had escaped the island, via an 8-region trek across South The us and by way of Central America and into the U. S. as a result of Texas two a long time back.
Both Yadira and her husband, Yohandris, ended up taken by ISIS. Yohandris was jailed pending a prolonged investigation, but Yadira, 8 months pregnant, was permitted to appear to Tuscaloosa where she had a relative. She had her toddler and was taken treatment of by the Jean Browning Foster Treatment House of the Victorious Life Church in Fosters the place they the two, with their American 2-12 months-previous Enzo, dwell these days.
The “breaking news” of the day awakens reminiscences, some pretty fond, some hideous, a lot of it reminding me of my have “breaking news” about the decades as I wandered around the globe with the superior Lord usually seeing my measures and functioning to continue to keep me out of trouble.
You all have a “news channel” in your memory lender. It is great to faucet in to often and sit again with a chilly one, or a cup of espresso, and keep in mind. If you have a buddy, a grandchild, or youthful young children listening, all the better. Then you can target on people components that you can share with young children and grandchildren.
Larry Clayton is a retired College of Alabama record professor. Audience can email him at [email protected]
