CNN News and Traveling

Watching CNN- dangers, fears, and death everywhere

As a part of the benefits of a hotel room in Mexico (and being a little close to Los Estados Unidos) is that I get a television in my room. I do not usually use these things – I hardly even know what they are – but the presence of a TV in this room after not gazing at one for months struck me as kind of a novelty. I turned it on, found CNN, and became afraid of the world. We, us, everybody is under attack. How can I travel in such a bleeding world, I do not know.

I am watching images of famine, war, and death roll out of the CNN and into my unsuspecting noggin. The babies in Papua New Guinea are dying, Myanmar is under water, the Republicans and Democrats are booth doomed, conservatives are happier than liberals, North Korea is still scary, and Islamic radicals in Beirut are tearing down pictures of their old prime minister and stomping on them in the streets. Yikes. And I still go out of my front door and into this wretched, wretched world?

The police in Mexico are even being assassinated and the country has lost control as the drug cartels are wiping out the government. Chaos must certainly be breaking out in the streets? No. Mexico is fine. I know this because I am in Mexico. I did not know that their crooked police chief was knocked off until I turned on the foreign CNN. The Mexicans do not seem to care. I went through a dozen police and military checkpoints today, and the soldiers were as dumb-smiling and the police were as beady-eyed as ever. They did not seem to care that the Mexico City police chief was assassinated.

The CNN makes money off of scaring people who are not at the source.

I do not make a habit of watching the news on TV or of reading newspapers. I travel to learn about the news. To really find out what is going on in this world I feel that you need to look people in the face. You need to hear the words from people’s mouths, and not through the well strategize sound bytes of CNN. Frightened people are going to try to learn about what threatens them. The news thought to be a main provider of this information. The more people that CNN can scare into staying in their homes, the more money they make, as people who stay in doors will watch CNN and shudder.

This world is not horrible, the people are not starving, and famine and strife are the global exceptions, rather than the rule.

To find the world as it really is, I feel that I need to travel.

CNN’s portrayal of a world under fire is simply untrue. I look out my window and everything out to the dusty horizon is nothing but tranquilo.

Travel has taught me that the world is alright.