Who Freaking Cares What the Pope Says About Having Kids?

Stop getting drawn in to the outrage of the week. We don’t have time or energy to waste on this.

OMG, I don’t care if the Pope thinks it’s selfish to have pets instead of kids. I haven’t clicked a single article about it because that’s not worth getting upset about — even though I’m a childfree-by-choice dog-adopter. My friends are sharing articles on Facebook about it and making comments mocking it.

Get a grip, people. Are you even Catholic? Isn’t the Pope childless? What does it matter what some loser in Rome says?

You Seem to Have Forgotten What Actual News Is

I’m not saying you shouldn’t follow the news. I just want you to follow, you know, serious news. Me, I listen to the PBS NewsHour podcast every day, and so should you. I used to watch it on my PBS Roku channel, which is also well worth doing because some of the footage shown by a real news outlet like NewsHour is pretty striking. But I can speed podcasts up on the Overcast app by 200% or 300% and that really saves me a lot of time.

I think most people have totally forgotten what actual news coverage looks like. We’d have a better society and world if all the opinion masquerading as news stopped airing, and everyone switched to PBS. Because they’re funded in part by a national endowment, unlike other “news” outlets, they’re actually required by law to abide by fairness doctrines.

Yes, I know that right-wingers will claim that PBS isn’t objective, but that’s because they’re brainwashed. They haven’t watched NewsHour. If they did (and I triple dog dare them to watch it), they’d be hard-pressed to claim it was unfair in any way. And they might learn something that’s actually important they’d had no clue about, like that shit is going down right now in Kazakhstan.

But I know. You’d rather consume only right-wing opinion “news” and learn nothing.

This Goes for Everyone, Though, Right and Left

Here are some things I’ve seen all of you posting about on social media. These stories might have gotten short coverage on NewsHour, but they certainly didn’t dwell on them because, in the scheme of things, they are not important.

1. The missing influencer girl and her boyfriend who took his own life after everyone searched for him or whatever. Of course, I don’t like people getting killed any more than you do, but focusing on this was a total waste of time and emotional energy. You know, there’s a fire in Turkmenistan that started in 1971 from drilling for natural gas that they’re only now looking for ways to put out because of the harmful ecological and health effects it causes.
2. That an innocent woman sadly got killed on a movie set with a gun that shouldn’t have been loaded with real bullets. That’s definitely sad but mostly I think interest in this story is caused by people’s love of judging others super-harshly — in this case, Alec Baldwin, I’ve heard. You know, Ethiopian and Eritrean forces are waging an extremely brutal war against the Tigrayan people right now. Or do black lives not matter to you?
3. That Ben Affleck said something that was maybe kind of not nice about his ex-wife. Again, it feels good to judge others harshly, doesn’t it? It’s like an addiction, I swear. You know, COVID is actually still raging, overwhelming hospitals, and breaking down our supply chains, which is bound to escalate inflation.
4. Critical race theory? Teachers are leaving or thinking about leaving the profession in droves right now. Schools can’t afford to lose even ONE teacher. Education is in complete disarray, and this shit is not helping. Get a freaking grip, people. Focus. Teachers are burned-out, overburdened, underpaid, and we freaking NEED them, but you’re going to get all upset about a teacher accurately letting white kids know that white people of their great-grandparents’ generation fought against school desegregation?
5. People getting upset about people being upset about comedians being jerks. First, there are the folks who get upset about what a comedian says. Then there are the folks who get upset that others are upset. This needs to stop. You’re all getting distracted. Leave Dave Chappelle alone and also leave the people who refuse to leave him alone alone. Neither thing is worth your energy. You know, the ocean is warming and it will kill off all the remaining, already-dwindling marine life.

You People Are Exhausting Me with This Shit

I truly do not understand having the mental bandwidth to engage in all the rages of the week. The obsession with celebrity is what gets to me the most. You are not a celebrity and you never will be one. You don’t know those celebrities personally and they do not actually affect your life.

I understand getting swept up in it for a minute. We all wanted Britney freed and got to celebrate when she finally was freed. We all get sad for a minute when a celebrity mensch dies. But let’s not get too invested in any of this because it

does

not

matter.

I promise you. What matters is — can we save this sick, sad world? For the children it was so selfish of me not to have, according to the Pope according to the headlines my Facebook friends shared, can we save it? We certainly won’t if you’re not willing to actually, for instance, learn what’s in the Build Back Better bill before you decide whether or not you oppose it.

In a way, it’s not your fault that you don’t know what has been in the Build Back Better bill, because you only consume low-quality news that fails to explain its provisions every time they’re changed, the way that, well, PBS Newshour does.

Try it out! Knowing important stuff is fun! It’s also likely to moderate the extreme positions you’ve adopted by being exposed only to opinion-based “news” and make you far more rational.

Save society, watch PBS.