Kozlowski: Stay abreast of current events

Like many of my peers, recently I’ve been guilty of not keeping up with current events. I was… Like many of my peers, recently I’ve been guilty of not keeping up with current events. I was out of the States for almost a month, and I’ve spent the subsequent weeks scurrying about trying to get settled into my new apartment.

Yet I felt an acute sense of withdrawal after being away from the news. Following current events is an old habit from my speech and debate days, and it’s a habit more people my age should acquire.

There are several excuses people usually give for being ignoramuses about the contemporary. First, that the world is just too depressing to think about, and ignorance is bliss. Second, that keeping up with the news in faraway places doesn’t make sense, as these events don’t really matter. Third, that keeping up with current events takes an inordinate amount of time.

It’s fair to say that the world is a depressing place. All we ever seem to hear about is an endless succession of wars, famines, strikes and ill-conceived celebrity “comeback” tours. It’s tempting to try to ignore all that. Unfortunately, we can’t. Eventually a problem becomes serious enough that we cannot help but notice it. Consider the current economic crisis. A few years ago, the collapse of the housing market was all over the news. This was easy enough to ignore provided your house wasn’t being foreclosed upon, you weren’t the president of a bank or being wiped out in the stock market. However, that bad news has caught up to us in a big way: About one in 10 Americans is out of a job, a reality which cannot be so easily overlooked.

The sooner a person knows that there is a problem or one down the road, the sooner that person can prepare  — or at least not be stunned when problems occur. Perhaps more importantly, because our system of government allows, nay, requires us to punish those responsible for recent calamities when we go to the polls, it is good to know who is to blame for problems both recent and dated.

But the news, both good and bad, doesn’t really matter to us, does it? Why should we care that King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck is trying to democratize Bhutan? Because in an increasingly globalized world, a piece of news in one place can have impacts thousands of miles away. When those reverberating effects finally hit our shores or our neighborhoods, those who haven’t been keeping track of the news will be entirely blindsided, and those who see only local impacts will spuriously conclude that the world makes very little sense. Or, alternately, they will be more susceptible to either incomplete or patently false explanations of how those impacts came to be.

Keeping up with the news as well as its important corollary — history — is also vital to avoid careening into a trap into which many people have fallen — the “this time it’s different” or the “this situation is unprecedented” way of thinking. Read enough in-depth analysis of current events and it becomes increasingly clear that a lot of the “revolutionary” and “earth-shaking” events we are confused by today have in fact happened in one form or another throughout history. For instance, if a military coup were to happen in Thailand in the next few years, I think many people would be surprised. They shouldn’t be. Such a coup certainly wouldn’t be the first, it wouldn’t be unexpected and it probably would lead to a period of military rule that would be relatively short. Closer to home, the near-collapse of the automotive industry and the bailouts that GM and Chrysler received are not really that exceptional. This last round of bailouts marks the second time Chrysler has been saved by government intervention. And last but not least, the current fear-mongering and distrust of China we hear bandied about these days sounds similar to earlier carping about how Japan was unstoppable and close to buying up America in the 1980s.

But doesn’t keeping up with the news take up an awful lot of time? Perhaps, if you insist on reading three newspapers daily from cover to cover. Yet a half-hour a day of glancing through headlines is not too taxing a task. How much time do people typically spend on Facebook anyway? Couldn’t some of that time be spent on Google News?

The bottom line is, keeping up with current events is vital if our generation is not to be surprised and dismayed when something too big to ignore pops up. Keeping up with events is also the first part of being a responsible citizen in a representative democracy. It can be dangerous to have a populace that is either ignorant or doesn’t care about the world around it, as that populace will not hold decision-makers accountable for bad decisions, or worse, will punish the wrong people at the polls.

So although I might have had a plausible excuse for not following the news this last month, I can’t think of too many others.

Write Mark at kozthought@gmail.com.