I once absent-mindedly ordered Three Mile Island dressing in a restaurant and, with great presence of mind, they brought Thousand Island Dressing and a bottle of chili sauce
eating fruits and vegetables is healthy until you’re vegan. then it’s just abusing your body and denying it essential nutrients. nobody knows what these nutrients are, but some say it’s protein.
Kun nyt Suomessakin on tällainen luonnonilmiö kuin kesä, niin pitänee varmaan muistuttaa, että älkää roskatko. Monet käy näin lämpimien säiden innostamana piknikillä ja muutenkin ulkona syömässä, mutta siinä sivussa monet myös päätyvät roskaamaan. Heitä roskat roskikseen, älä maahan! Jos olet kaupungissa, niin on hyvin todennäköistä että siinä jossain kulman takana on roskis. Fiksuna voit myös etukäteen varata mukaan muovipussin esim. piknikille, jotta siihen voi kerätä kaikki roskat. Jos pystyt tuottamaan roskia, niin pystyt myös viemään ne roskikseen.
Nowhere is safe… can’t go to the club, can’t go to school, can’t go to concerts, can’t take the subway like what can you do 😞
hey so without minimizing the terror of what happened tonight, i want to share this video, where vox producer carlos maza talks about how the way terrorism is covered by the media enhances and alters the way that we perceive terrorism. basically he says that when you turn on cable news and see 24-hour news coverage of an incident and the same violent footage over and over, your brain starts to think that terrorism is common—when in actuality, the chances of you or someone you know being involved in a terrorist attack are really, really, really small.
it’s also important to remember that news networks make money off of views during coverage of terrifying events: the more a news network sensationalizes an event, the more they show horrifying footage, the more they interview visibly shaken witnesses… the harder it’s going to be for their viewers to look away. which leads to more money for them, and increased fear in communities (which is then exploited by politicians through fear mongering and what security expert bruce schneier, who is interviewed in the video, calls “security theater”).
i found what’s said in this video to be comforting because it’s really easy to come away from a night of news coverage like we had tonight and be afraid. it would be really easy for me to work myself up tonight and go to work tomorrow and watch my classroom fill with students and wonder how many of them will make it to adulthood, because this and that and the other thing. it would be really easy for me to think that everything is futile because the world is so fucked up that the little things we do aren’t going to matter in the long run, but that kind of thinking isn’t healthy.
i’m not saying that it’s wrong to be afraid. we are living in a bizarre, upside-down world full of things to be afraid of. i want to echo what maza and schneier say in the video: you have to be a skeptical consumer of news. you have to remember who produces the news you watch and why they do it. but even more than that, you have to protect your heart, and you have to keep yourself from operating out of a place of fear.
terrible things happen every day. we have to talk about them and we have to give them the respect they deserve and we have to figure out why they happened and how we can stop them from happening again. and we have to resist the urge to let fear dictate our actions.
As someone who until recently worked in breaking news, so well stuck into the headspace of the 24/7 news cycle, this fear-cycle is real – I think it’s important to acknowledge that it’s also a very unnatural way of processing horrifying events. When you get bad news in your personal life – a friend passes away, someone gets sick – you usually have some control over the pace and depth with which you deal with this information; you have time to get perspective and help and work out how far this thing is likely to impact you. The event itself is no less bad, but in personal crises you have more capacity for emotional protection and processing than if you’re glued to a cycle of unprocessed raw updates.
When I was covering crises, it was important for me to remind myself that my fear the next day about getting on the tube or going to a club or a mall was artificially amped up because I had no space from the coverage. Doing this daily had a huge, tangible affect on my mental health; learning every gruesome detail was a requirement of the job, but most times didn’t actually help me process or understand better. I think people need gentle reminding that the 24/7 cycle doesn’t have to be your default, and it’s very often unhealthy to be so – if you can, turn off push notifications for a few hours, designate a time to catch up on the news, avoid social media for a while. Ask yourself what you, personally, need to know to feel like you can have some temporary closure or a break. It’s natural to want to know more, but you have to build in the vital recovery time the news cycle doesn’t give you.
