An enormous downside to social media platforms like Twitter is the inevitable news cycle addiction. Every news story demands immediate reaction, response, emotion. Unwarranted meaning is attributed to transient world events, and the bigger picture is pushed aside. Take the suspicious explosion in stories regarding South Africa and Cuba. Why are we suddenly hearing about unrest there? I don’t trust it, mainly because it smells like astroturf, a prelude to US military intervention. This is what the end result will be: sanctions, troops, weapons, aid. The weapons industry wants their product exported to other nations, now that the US is making an unceremonious exit from Afghanistan, and so now we hear and see accounts of violence abroad, and believe that it is somehow different from what usually happens abroad. Violence and unrest are our natural state, and funneling weapons, money, and mercenaries into conflict zones will only greatly worsen the problems. But news cycle addicts have a knee-jerk opinion about Cuba’s freedom fighters, or SA unrest. That’s the bait that sucks you in. America is not Cuba, America is not South Africa. It’s none of our business what happens in those nations. Let them sort our their own problems, while we focus on ours here at home. No more nation-building, “humanitarian intervention”, or spreading American-style democracy at gunpoint. And don’t fall for the wild churning cycle of news.
