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October 23, 1998

Today in the news...

Today will be a "news commentary" day. In my research for my Metajournals article on Matthew Shepard, I discovered something that left a bad taste in my mouth. It seems that there are only a few journalists that talk about real-life situations and what happens around them. Many seem so self-absorbed in their own lives that they don't write down the impact that the outside world has on it. It seemed the most severe in the younger journal writers, who are concerned with whom they are dating or wanting to date or raptured in their angst. The older journal writers were more reflective and did talk about their view of what was happening in the world around them... and I should do the same in my journal. The first tidbit of news was that the parade for the Yankees was today, so two of my coworkers, Doris and Erin, left for about three hours to go watch the parade. They took photographs with my digital camera and my disposable camera (which I should get developed sometime soon). Here are two of the myriad of photographs that they took... Having the Yankees win the World Series and encountering the hype surrounding it, I am reminded of when I went to see a Reds game with Josh (Sherman) and Brian (Martin) when I was in college. I found that trip to watch baseball (my one and only) particularly fascinating because I've never been to a baseball game before and I got to watch it with a person who was intimately familiar with the rules of the game. Watching it on television, I find it exceedingly boring. I wish I found sports as exciting as I do other activities, or that I could watch it with the same wide-eyes that I did when I went to that baseball game. Alas, I can't. The company is no longer knowledgable, and I feel terribly outclassed by my sports-knowledgable coworkers. I'm happy that the Yankees won, not because I like the game, but because of the identification that I recognize the Yankees have with New York.. and I'm proud that the city where I work has the winners of the World Series. I like the fact that baseball seems like far more a team-related sport than other sports where the inclusion of a single player makes all the difference (Michael Jordan leaving the Bulls for a short while to play baseball hurt their game play... and this is a team related sport?) (Mark Macguire's and Sammy Sosa's influence on their team's success is evidence for this observation). I am shocked and amazed at the amount of paper that is falling in the photographs. It makes me want to scream out, "You are being so outrageously wasteful! Don't do that! Stop it!" However, there is something beautiful in all that paper.. all the flittering falling down like cherry blossoms in the spring. I wanted to be in the middle of that storm. Let the flakes of paper fall upon me and cover me. Confetti to the nth degree. In other news, a Tennessee senator was killed, supposedly by his opponent. I've been watching the television commercials of the election campaigns this year in the New York area and I can't believe how vicious the campaigns seem to be. Instead of promoting their own records, all I hear about is how terrible their opponents were. The mudslinging is disgusting! I wonder what the campaign is like in the Tennessee competition... and I find it hard to believe how far people will go for things. I'm glad I'm not registered to vote here. I don't want to vote for any of these candidates. I abstain. I am angry. In upper new york, a doctor that who performed abortions for a living was killed, "gunned down by a single shot from a high-powered rifle" according to CNN. He was at home, seemingly safe, when the bullet struck and killed him by a sniper. This frightens me and makes me angry. Here is a man just making a living as an abortionist... he didn't make the moral decision to have the abortion, it was the women who come to his clinic. I read that he was repeatedly harrassed as a murderer. The real murderer (if there is one in these cases) are the mothers that have decided to not have these children for one reason or another. Why do people want to stop the abortionists and instead try to talk to the people who are having them, maybe give up their children to adoption? How about educating children and sexually active adults about the responsibilites of children? Did the murderer of this doctor even think about the family that is left behind? Fighting for the unborn is an admirable thing, but two wrongs don't make a right. I wish they could understand that... they should stretch out with sympathy for the pregnant women and with education, not with fear tactics and murder. I am so angry...

© Copyright 1998, Eileene Coscolluela
[woolgathering]