News is like a box of chocolates, as momma might have said. Sometimes the chocolates are fresh and delicious and bring pleasure and excitement.
A lot of the time, though, the chocolates are stale, filled with noxious jelly, or pull your teeth out.
I’m feeling a bit like that about the news lately.
I hear about what the Harper government is up to here in Canada and overseas, and I am filled with impotent rage. I hear stories about abuse and murder and pain and listen to people making non-excuses at length for inexcusable behaviour.
And then there’s the weather reporting.
Oh. My. Polar. Vortex.
Somehow, somewhere along the way, we’ve decided at the gizzard-viewers we call weather reporters need to be known by name, as if they were reporting in depth analysis of a political situation or ravages of famine or world war. This has led to the inevitable increase in the drama of weather reporting.
It snows.
We are told we are getting a astonishing 2-4 cm here in the Maritimes. It’s terrifying. We should all quake in fear. Predictably, the snowflakes fall on electric wires and knock them down. We lose power. It comes on again so we can hear about snowmageddon, icy roads, winter, in terms that echo a terrorist attack by that evil Jack Frost. For an inch or two of snow?
And meanwhile, behind the panic over wind, someone is quietly destroying libraries, our civil liberties are being removed, democracy is being crushed, the environment burns.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say the meteorologists were in on the whole destruction of Canada as we know it thing.
I hasten to add that, other than the hyperbole, maritime weather forecasters seem to know what they are doing, a good thing for an area that makes most of it’s living on the sea and land. They seem capable of placing a given snowflake in a given location at least 70% of the time. Which is pretty good.
But they need to stop trying to match in tone the world disasters happening all over. There’s enough of that for anyone.
As for me, I need a break. Time to turn on music, avoid the news, breathe the vortex-laden air. I can’t bear any more for a bit. I’m full right up.