While I was in Africa, the baseball season opened. By the time I got home, the Angels were hovering around .500 and locked in a tight AL West race. I had missed the whole first week of the season. And yet I hadn’t missed it.
I also “missed” the brouhaha over judges that is filling the airwaves and blogosphere, Charles and Camilla’s wedding and Pope John Paul II's funeral. (I did hear of his passing, that was quite big news in Africa where there was a glimmer of hopeful speculation that the next Pope might be African.) And a few episodes of The Apprentice.
It doesn’t take traveling to the third world to get out of step with what is big news in the first world. A camping trip will do. But part of what happens to me whenever I break out of the “news cycle” is I have to readjust to what we consider worthy of our attention, consideration and investment of time.
So, imagine the sense of culture shock when I return from a land where a good number of people don’t have electricity, clean water or the medications they need, only to turn on my screen and see a young woman who decides that the way to recover from a divorce and the physical effects of giving birth to two babies is to have a $24,000 plastic surgery so that she can “look like Jennifer Aniston.” The MTV2 show is called, “I want a famous face.” I am embarrassed to say that I sat for almost the whole episode locked in a depressed and morbid curiosity listening to a young single mom tell about how if she can only look like the Friends star, she’ll regain her self-confidence and won’t feel jealous of young, hard-bodied friends when she goes line dancing or to the lake.
T. S. Eliot was right, “…the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” It’s just that sometimes a clear perspective can be hard to take in.
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