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Radio, With Digression Back in August, while staying in the home of the lovely Elizabeth, some idiot broke into my car and stole my CD player. I haven't replaced it yet - I'm too cheap (she says, buying every Christmas gift in sight) and I have a short commute, and while I intend to and Greg keeps telling me to, I haven't yet. This means two things. 1: I have a small pile of CDs I haven't really listened to yet (the new Matchbox Twenty, Vanessa Carlton, the Muppet Show anniversary CD, the Christmas mix that came in Michele's Christmas card) and 2: I've been listening to the radio. I started out trying to listen to music stations, but you know what? They all suck. Unfortunately, I could probably sing you Jenny From the Block in its entirety. I tried various morning shows, but they mostly suck too - I actually remember finding Howard Stern funny once upon a time, but now I just find him tired. So I switched to NPR, and with one near-fatal exception to try out the Philly area's "All Christmas, All the Time" station, I haven't looked back. (Brief digression: I really dislike Christmas songs that seem blatantly designed to manipulate the emotions, like The Christmas Shoes. I know a lot of people like this Butterfly Kisses type of music, or stuff like Dear Mr. Jesus, but I just don't. Greg and I give money to a wide variety of charities throughout the year, and we step up our giving at Christmas. We send money to food banks and shut-in programs and buy gifts off every angel tree we can find. I don't need a song to remind me that we're lucky, and other people aren't, and that I should give back. Maybe that's not the intention, but the song still irks me anyway.) So I listen to NPR, and it's really interesting. (Those of you who have been listening for years, of course, are shaking your heads and saying duh.) Like, today on All Things Considered there was a really interesting and sobering program about a North Carolina school district that's struggling to get enough ESL teachers to teach English to all the children of the Latino immigrants who settle in the area. And they have a lot of authors on, and a lot of really interesting "man on the street" type of stuff and even though I get tired of hearing the same headlines over and over, their original programming is very good and I enjoy that stuff a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of it pisses me off, too. And when those things are newspaper headlines, they piss me off even more. For instance, the more I hear about stupid Trent Lott and his incredibly stupid comment about Strom Thurmond: I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either. the more pissed off I get. Riiiiiiight. The country would be in great shape today - as long as you're white. Because remember, my friends, good ol' Strom had this to say in that campaign: All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches. Hearing that once pissed me off. Hearing it repeated over and over again? I don't care if Lott meant that to be racist or not - it was an idiotic thing to say, and a divisive thing to say, and unworthy of someone who's supposed to be a leader in our government. Lott's an idiot, and proving it by being closemouthed on the topic and making himself look even worse. As if that's not bad enough, I have to endlessly hear about how the Bush administration has proposed more leeway in logging. Basically, they propose to let the local Forest Service managers (government employees) decide when to log, where to log, and how much to log, and not require any research on what it's killing or destroying forever. This is after, to quote from that article, the new administration declined to appeal a judge's decision overturning Clinton regulations putting nearly 60 million acres of undeveloped forestland off limits to roadbuilding and timbering. Because, you know, we must have more wood. Why do we need wilderness areas? We just need wood. Who cares what lives there? As this great editorial from the Philly Inquirer says, America's forests are open for business. Yes, Bush signed a bill to help save some wetlands. Some. You'll forgive me if I think this is merely an attempt to bolster his environmental credentials; this administration is in the back pocket of the oil industry and has done so many scary things to the Clean Air Act that I want to hide under my desk with my inhaler. (Have you seen the asthma statistics? Do you think the amount of pollution and the number of people with asthma, especially children, is a coincidence?) Anyway. This was not supposed to be another political rant. (Don't even get me started on the protection for a pharmaceutical company against autism lawsuits that got slipped into the HOMELAND SECURITY ACT.) You all know I'm green; I intend to continue to use this journal to talk about environmental issues. Maybe I need a blog. Yes, I wish people were more informed. Yes, I wish people were more careful about the size of their footprint on the Earth. Yes, I wish more people would start getting pissed off about their allergies and their two-year-old's asthma and the cancer rates in their area and the smog over their city and the price of their gas - whether those things affected them or not. But I was talking about NPR, wasn't I? Except it hardly seems to matter now. |