Too Happy? Read the News

It had become a common routine for me, returning home from a good day of activities in Buenos Aires only to open up my laptop and check out the news. Talk about going from good mood to utter disbelief in the latest news story on cnn.com or bbc.com. News anymore, whether you receive it from your television set or internet, is synonymous with a prescription to turn happiness into a downer. Sometimes, you have to question how much you can take of Obama vs. Hillary, the Olympic protests, the Bush Administration´s Iraq policy, Zimbabwe´s new President/s, some idiot who tried to cash a $360 billion check in Texas, and the sad list goes on. If you excuse me while I go on a tangent, really American politics? How many different ways can you divide the votes? (black vs. white vote, men vs. women, Hispanic woman vote vs. white man vote).

Oh I´m warmed up now, tangent number 2, a kid tried cashing a $360 billion dollar check. The ignorance of people never ceases to amaze me, so sad you can´t help but laugh it out. Needless to say, the news was just a bit too ridiculous for my taste. After too many smiles had been turned upside down by the steady feed of depressing news, I decided enough was enough. A news fasting period, as I like to think of it, was in store.

The fasting period would be for 10 days, I went without checking the typical yahoo news, cnn.com, bbc.com or whatever it may be. The only exlusion from this group was espn.com, I mean come on, sports news aren´t that depressing unless you´re an avid New York Knicks fan. What would I do with this excess free time? I decided the internet is a tricky place, but lucky for us we can go anywhere that piques our interest. The time spent on my computer was now going to expanding my knowledge on different topics, mainly on wikipedia. I would choose a different topic each day which resulted in a new self-education system. The majority of my time went to reading up on health, cooking, history of Argentina, globalization, Ronaldinho and many more random topics. Another portion of the time went to keeping in tune with the world of commerce via the McKinsey Quarterly and Economist.com. This period of researching whatever the hell my little heart desired brought me back to restored happiness in terms of my internet reading. Things weren´t right, I was just letting my mind wander and the happiness was getting to be overbearing. Time had come to get back to the ¨real world¨and read the news.

My first visit to cnn online after a 10 day hiatus welcomed me back in open arms. ¨22,000 people killed in Myanmar Cyclones.¨ This number of casualties has now been estimated near 100,000. The harsh reality of natural disasters has come back to remind us of the tsunamis in Southeast Asia and Hurricane Katrina just several years ago. My only hope for cause of action right now is that aid arrives to the few survivors in Burma more quickly than the case was in 2005 with Katrina. My thoughts go out to all of those effected by the cyclones. The fact that a large proportion of a country´s population can be whiped out in a matter of days is a cold reminder that all of our personal problems are very miniscule contrary to our neighbors around the globe.

I thought this was bad enough but the next headline grabbed my eyes even more, ¨Drug raid hits SDSU.¨ Great! Now my alma mater has a polished reputation for drug trafficking from Mexican cartels straight to the fraternity houses resulting in two deaths of drug overdose in the last year alone on campus. Ironically, the majority of them were Criminal Justice and Homeland Security majors. At least my resume will be nice and ready for my job interview next week in Medellin, Colombia as a druglord. See you in Miami! Needless to say, I´m feeling a bit sarcastic today. It only took one day for the news to recapture me in its illumination of the madness.

Back to espn and the wiki!