You're Probably Annoying Me, Too

 As I move through my days a topic for a posting will occasionally pop into my head and when it does I try to jot down a brief note that will hopefully jog my memory when I'm ready to do some writing.  Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't.  A lot of the time I can't read my own writing.  “Jellyroll astronaut?  What the hell does that mean?”  Anyway, as you can imagine, there are a few topics that reoccur.  Number One on the hit list is some variation of People Annoy The Shit Out of Me. 

Repeating myself, I hope, in my affirmation that it's not because they ARE annoying but rather that I FIND them annoying.  Perhaps they find me annoying.  I'm okay with this.  I'm good with this.  I don't really care if they find me annoying and there are times that I'm annoying on purpose.  Today, in the Executive Lounge, early in the morning, there were a couple of stupified, slack-jawed men in there eating their pre-breakfast (apparently they needed something substantial in their protruding corpulence to tide them over until they can have a good, solid, PROPER breakfast when one of the breakfast venues opens up in like twenty minute) and watching a news program that I find repetitive and consistently stupid.  I pondered briefly and then decided not to say something like this: “So what are we supposed to be afraid of today?”  I could substitute “outraged about” in place of “afraid of” and still get my point across.  Fear and Anger is what partisan news organizations peddle.  It gets people watching and it absolutely hooks people who won't take five minutes to check in with anyone who might disagree with these pre-arranged sentiments.

I remained silent while judging deliciously in my own mind.The next day I walked back into the Executive Lounge - still windowless, small - to grab some coffees yesterday and was not surprised to see a highly partisan news program blaring away with a couple of different slack-jawed men eating their pre-breakfast breakfast, eyes glued to the screen, transfixed, zombie-like.  I take the time to look at sites that broadcast opinions-masquerading-as-news just to get a taste of opposing viewpoints.  It's clear that the best way to get people engaged with your organization is to piss them off or scare the shit out of them.  There were three bits that I caught a whiff of - two were Outrage! at some minor social gaffes (or probably mischaracterizations) that this particular source overlooks when it's their guy and pinpoints when it's not.  There's an old Bible verse about tending to the log in one's own eye before trying to pluck out the speck in another's.  The bit that was designed to make people Be Afraid! was some ridiculous made-up story about aliens hovering over the East Coast and why wasn't this being clearly enunciated to all of the dangerously threatened citizens?  Why the cover-up!?  Where's the military?!  The government - never trust the lying government!! - has repeatedly stated that the aliens were actually airplanes with total clearance or small personal drones with a perfectly legal right to be in that airspace.  

Facts are such bullshit when they get in the way of what we want to believe.