One evening a father was sitting in front of the television, watching the evening news. His teenage son happened to walk through, and stopped for a moment. A commercial came on, and so the son said, “Dad, how can you bear to watch that stuff?”
His father looked up. “Well, otherwise I would not know that I needed to apply it directly to the forehead.”
His son laughed. “No, not the commercial. The other stuff. The war. The presidential campaign. The business mergers. The stock market. All that stuff. How can you bear to watch it?”
His father was curious, because he had not assumed his son’s lack of interest in current events was principled, or that he had even thought about it. He turned off the television—the next story up was about Oprah—and gestured to a nearby chair. His son sat down, and his father asked. “First, why do you ask?”
“Well,” the son said. “It seems to me that there are two problems about world events. The first is that we cannot possibly know the truth about any of that stuff. We are fed tidbits about everything in 45 second installments. If I studied any subject at school that way, I would be a moron. And secondly, even if the truth about some situation managed to get through, and we learned something real, what could we possibly do about it?”
His father sat thoughtfully for a moment. “Those are both cogent objections—and I have actually thought through both of them.”
His son laughed. “I assumed you had. That’s why I asked.”
“With regard to the first objection, when I watch a story about the war, for example, I am not studying the war. If I want to do that, I need to do something more in depth. But I am studying what our handlers want us to believe about the war. It is important to know what direction you are being pushed, whether by CNN or by Fox.”
“Okay. I get that,” his son said. “But that leads to my second point. Suppose you figure all that out. What can you do about it?”
“Well, it might seem like it isn’t very much, but it really is. When you figure out what direction you are being pushed, push back.”