It’s Not The Apocalypse

I have read a lot of post-apocalyptic books and watched a lot of movies. I’m sure you have as well. That’s probably one of the reasons why I’m finding the news so distressing at the moment; because it all looks so familiar. But if that was the only issue then I think we would be okay and we would see a lot more people behaving like reasonable adults. Unfortunately, we also have a lot of experience of modern news reporting to go on.

We all saw what the media did during the Brexit campaign and during the most recent election. Until recently we could see it happening in the Democratic Primary in America. We know that the media isn’t presenting us with an unbiased factual report of what is going on. They are using the same attention grabbing techniques that they have always used, the scare tactics and rhetoric. Unfortunately this seems to be creating two courses of action:

  1. People refusing to believe what they are being told and carrying on life as normal.
  2. People believing that the world is going to end and panic buying toilet paper and hand sanitiser.

Neither is a good response, but I can’t blame anyone for either. This is what the media does now and no one trusts it. Either we assume they are over-inflating the crisis, or that they are deflating it. There’s no real way of knowing which one of these it is or if, in this rarest of moments, they have all decided to start being professional journalists and are reporting things accurately.

There’s no short term answer to this and I’m not here to tell anyone what to do. My advice would be to listen to the doctors and nurses who are working on the front line and have first-hand experience of what is going on. And, while it’s probably a good idea to play it safe, can I suggest that if we run out of toilet paper in the shops we have probably already run out of something much more important.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *