If you want to get informed...

After being positively grilled by members of my host family and other Czechs a few weekends ago about the current state of the American healthcare system, governmental conspiracy theories about 911, and the economic stipulations of maternity leave, I’m feeling like a pretty lame and un-informed US citizen, let alone global citizen.

I must be honest and say this is not new territory for me—even throughout the last presidential election—a time I should have been eating the latest headlines and news articles for breakfast—I tend to steer clear of breaking headlines and the 6:00 news. I have had a few surges of effort to get informed, but they usually fizzle out after a little while, and my focus and attention returns more to my immediate surroundings, or those that affect me the most.

How hypocritical of me! Here I am ranting about the importance of remembering history and “where we came from,” but I don’t even know where we’re at right now! And where do you start—every current event has scads of back-story, so by the time I get up to speed on one situation I’ll be behind, and clueless about everything else.

In accordance with a past coaches wisdom though, if you want to get informed, get informed; and in accordance with wisdom from Big John, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. And, in accordance with some other famous person’s wisdom, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (or something like that…)

Therefore, on the first leg of my journey back to T-town (Tisovec), a seven hour train ride, I decided to take yet another set of first steps towards informed-ness by saturating my brain with the contents of the November 14th issues of “the Economist” and USA Today.

By taking my time and chipping through the articles “one bite at a time” at a leisurely pace I learned: Brazil is pretty much kicking ass and taking names in world economy right now (predicted in 2003—but they bes’ not get cocky…), music piracy is on the decline because of smarty and tactical spending on advertising within the industry, flora from our guts might be the flavor-of-the-week scapegoat for obesity (read the article, the conclusion is pretty funny in that dry, witty “Economist” way), Tortillas in Wisconsin made all kinds of people violently ill—and it ain’t the first time—, GM might be on their way to paying back governmental loans, but are nowhere near out of the dark, and Sarah Palin is on another publicity tour for her new book, saying more things on Oprah and the like that you just know Saturday Night Live is storing up in their lampoon artillery supply.

For a while it felt good—with each page turned I was acquiring new or at least updated and pertinent information, I could practically feel myself getting informed. Yet while many of the articles were about specific places or organizations (which I can conceptualize), most of them also included giant statistics, percentages, or some kind of number that my brain just wasn’t quite sure how to handle.

Take tortillas for example. I’ve read “Fast-food Nation” and “Omnivore’s Dilemma”—heck, I even took a class in college called “Against the grain: social justice in food activism.” I know the generally processed nature of US food (and really the global food supply of at least first world countries…) is less than desirable. But this article illustrated a concrete example of the vast chains and virtually untraceable webs of production and distribution of our food, and the complete oblivion we have as to where what we stuff in our maws comes from or how it is produced. It also proved the often reckless sanitary or safety measures those “food” producers take, all intrinsically bound up in the macrocosmic issue of hunger, by way of state-subsidized meals for children, and how both federal and state government try to confront it. That’s a mouthful, ain’t it?

I started to get stressed out and think about all the far reaching implications of that one instance. Tortillas and school children today, meat or peanut butter for the masses tomorrow, and in the end all these examples are just metonymies for the complete removal we have from our most basic necessities to live, and how systemized our lives have become.

I also read articles predominantly about fiscal mergers, divorces and content. My brother Chris constantly urges me to take a few economic courses (macro and micro AT LEAST) just so I know how this part of the world works. I think he’s right, because while I have a reasonable level of common sense and “street smarts,” I really really suck at numbers. I have always been bad at conceptualizing huge sums—I can’t walk into a sporting area and guesstimate the thousands of people it is capable of accommodating, and if we’re talking money by the time we get into distinguishing between millions and billions I loose track of the nuances.

Maybe it’s because I have a hard time locating myself or what role I play/how I fit into these huge matrices of cost, population, and the like. I mean, that’s probably why I’m residing in a town that is smaller than most Universities in the US, and my current occupation is heavily dependant on person-to-person interaction and could best be summed up as a ‘professional communicator.’

Ok, we get it, there’s a lot of information out there. It is hard to sift through all the crap to find the really important stuff, and when you don’t speak economic/ political jargon you might as well be reading a foreign language. But is that really an excuse? Should I just cop-out and say “It’s hard so I just won’t do it” (did that with a math class in college, got a D…). No, I don’t think avoidance is the answer anymore. I’m spending a lot of time and energy learning Slovak, so the least I can do is absorb some new terminology and concepts as well. Maybe I just need to pace myself, sort of monitor my current-event intake at first so I don’t spontaneously combust because of how small it all makes me feel.