TMI (too much information)

One of the downsides of living in the Information Age is that we’re all getting
way more information than we can handle.

Take science, for example. If we really acted on the barrage of scientific and
pseudo-scientific findings that make the news every day, we’d each presumably
be living 130 years of a trans fat-free, red meat-less, Omega 3-filled
existence.

Instead, most health news — and I use both terms with reservations — passes
over us like mist on the pond, leaving our chubby, artery-clogged selves snugly
wedged into the recliner.

But enough about me.

Oh, there’s still plenty of hard news around. Some of this — “Kennedy Shot,”
“Man Lands on Moon,” “Berlin Wall Falls” — actually merits the monster headlines
that are so commonplace nowadays.

Still, as everybody knows, an awful lot of what passes for news is just static.

Case in point: This morning “Cracker Barrel Comes to Aiken” appeared on the
front page of my hometown paper, top fold, in half-inch type, side by side with
a legitimately alarming headline about a new nuclear reactor being installed 25
miles outside the city limits.

Now, it could be that gigantic headlines have proliferated because newspaper
typeface is these days produced electronically rather than with tangible molten
lead or wooden blocks. Or, in this one instance, it may be that, whereas sex
used to sell newspapers, food now does it better.

One way or the other, with the volume of information coming at us every day, we
could well be losing the ability to discern what matters and what doesn’t.

Maybe that’s how PASTOR, CHURCH TO BURN QURANS ON TV becomes headline news all
around the world, and why it takes the U.S. president, the secretary of Defense
and a four-star general, not to mention the Vatican and the government of
Indonesia, to convince said pastor and said church to cease and desist.

Who decided to put this guy in the news, anyway?

Harder question: If you don’t like this guy being in the news, who are you to
say so?

Ugh. It’s so very hard to live in a country where everybody is somebody, and
where anybody anywhere can shove his two-bit politics or half-baked theology in
the face of pretty much everybody else.

And yet, fellow Americans, this is what we get for living in a constitutionally
governed, democratic republic that protects the freedom of speech. The kooks
will have their say, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Despite our blurred powers of discernment, we can still usually trust ourselves
to recognize a kook for what he is. When Sarah Palin and Nancy Pelosi both come
forward to accuse the would-be Quran-burner of needless provocation, we can
safely assume that our own first impression of this fellow in Florida was
correct.

What’s far more worrying is that the information overflow reaches every corner
of the planet. Do the guys watching TV in a Peshawar cafe know that nearly all
of us over here believe the pyro pastor is a kook?

Or do they think he’s typical?

Yikes.