Not all weeks contain big or world-changing news. Very often it takes the passing of time for the news of the day to become part of our history lessons. Last week was certainly full of all kinds of news, but we’ll have to wait to see what kind of history might have been made.
The second week of April 2018 saw missiles launched over Syria as tensions tightened between the U.S. and Russia. The stock market continued to seesaw and wild and weird weather covered much of the country. For the first time ever, a whole series of baseball games (and not just one game) was cancelled by foul weather. Ex-FBI chief James Comey called his president a “liar” and morally unfit to serve. In turn, Mr. Trump called Comey a “slime ball.”
Also in the news was a raid on the president’s private lawyer’s office, more talk about the president and a pornstar and two days of Congressional hearings about Facebook and how it fails to protect the privacy of its two billion users.
Surely, there must be something historic in all that news coverage, but there was nothing like the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that happened during the same week 50 years ago. And there was no sinking of the Titanic like there was during the same calendar period in 1912.
Headlines in the week’s newspapers were astounding. One declared “America in real danger in the Age of Disbelief” and another labeled the “internet as a monster.” Even newspapers made their own news when the staff of The Denver Post printed an entire section of opinions attacking the fitness and journalistic ethics of its ownership, a Wall Street-based hedge fund that has been slashing newspaper staff. The Post’s editor called his bosses “vulture capitalists.”
Thank goodness most of our local news was much tamer. Even the weather was pleasant, with a little rain and nice sunshine in between. Last week’s wildfires happened far away; this time in Oklahoma and not here.
Our biggest local news was probably the capacity crowd of opponents and proponents for pending cannabis cultivation rules and land zonings. The county Board of Supervisors is facing a tough decision balancing rural neighborhood safety concerns with the new legal right to commercially grow marijuana.
Maybe our most poignant news moment here was the Sunday blessing of the fleet at the annual Bodega Bay Fisherman’s Festival. The ceremony was dampened by the prospect of another delayed and curtailed local commercial salmon fishing season.
For quite awhile now, our local news often overlaps with regional and even global news. There was another example last week when several local schools were the targets of hoax threats that were emailed from the United Kingdom.
A lot of last week’s news seemed to be about trust, the truth and morality. Actually, the news themes were about the lack of the above.
This may have been most evident in the Congressional hearings with Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg. Big parts of the hearing covered fake, corrupted and manufactured news — at the expense of lost privacy, innocence and the truth, or real news.
What might be historic about last week is that we found out millions of people don’t really trust Facebook. And they don’t trust their president or Congress, either. A disturbing number of us don’t even trust each other. We used to disagree but now we disavow, disparage and spread disbeliefs.
If this kind of news keeps up, we’re not sure what kinds of history lessons we will study in the future. Can you imagine us disagreeing on whether the Titanic actually sank or not, let alone whether our current president knows how to tell the truth?
