Whether we’re getting home, getting up, or sleeping right through it, it happens every single day. Dawn breaks all over the world every twenty-four hours, and our planet comes alive with noise and light.
In my neighborhood, Roo the rooster starts crowing a bit before five, and within 30 minutes the geese, donkeys, hawks, peacocks, dogs and vehicles are stirring. The sun isn’t up yet.
Daybreak feels good. It’s living, moving. It’s a relief.
In case you can’t think of anything to worry about, turn on the news. BBC Radio has a lovely way of dispatching the snags of the day, but if you’re hard core, click on a morning network news show and have complacency startled right out of you. It’s wrong to call them news shows as they are opinion shows. “Tragic.” “Noteworthy.” “Needless.” “Robust.” “Offensive.” The adjectives inserted by editors of teleprompter copy are nonsense. Surely we’re savvy enough to absorb straight news and decide for ourselves whether it’s dreadful or delightful.
Facebook being shut down for five hours? It’s as though FB learned about distributing information from the covid handbook. Or the other way around.
“This is awful,” people wrote. “We rely on Facebook for our income, our advertising, our family and classmate ties, our entertainment.”
Which might be well and true, but must we have government intervention to decide what’s tasteful and useful? Are we seriously asking the government to take care of us by regulating Facebook?
Facebook is our problem, not the government’s. FB has already said that it blocks cruelty, incorrect information and repeat offenders. So… why not be vicious liars, over and over? If everyone got banned, poof! Facebook wouldn’t have any likers.
When did we lose our independent girth? There was a time when a group of men rode horses to late night meetings to forge and draft a code by which they believed a fair and just country should abide. They determined that the new United States of America should provide equality, support, and protection in order to be a more perfect union.
And it did, at least for those who wrote the Constitution, but hey, isn’t every club exclusive? Women and others will get those same rights any century now.
The new USA needed to cut the cable with Stepmother England, and to do that, muscly men had to go into the woods and fire flintlock muskets at professional soldiers wearing opera attire who fired Brown Bess muskets back at them.
For seven years they did this. When the British finally got on their boats and went home, our new government was gracious and practical enough to say, “Thank you all for fighting for our freedom. Yes, we have no money to pay you, but we promise to protect and invest in you.” And they did.
Somewhere, somehow, the government became the model for Facebook – get as much as you can from the people who want to be part of you, be as accelerated and blistering and secretive as possible, and get paid for it.
Our government spends its money on weapons and our Facebook spends its money on what’s-his-name.
I think it was Muhammad Ali who said, “You want to go back to the beginning, to what made you pretty.”
Yes. I’m all for rebellion, but only if it’s good-natured.
Morning has broken.