over-emotionalism

This is one of those posts where you're free to disagree with me. These are my opinions. And I realize that my personal psychology may strongly influence me in the direction I'm talking about.

(I took that right-brain-left-brain test that Tracey and Kate talked about. I won't put the results up here; suffice it to say they basically told you "We would never let you into our art school, you evil left-brained person. You probably aren't even creative enough to tie your own shoes!" I would argue the lack-of-creativity bit. I'm pretty creative, at least in specific ways: I tend to see the weird connections between things other people don't, and I kick butt when it comes to problem-solving. But whatever. If the test were put out by, say, an engineering school it would probably tell the right-brained people: "We do not think you could be happy here; you seem too prone to flights of fancy" or something like that.)

Anyway.

The other day, I switched on the evening news, a bit too early for my local news. And caught a few minutes of the CBS national news.

And there was some story on, I'm guessing about the health-insurance "crisis." There was a woman being interviewed who lost her daughter, I guess because the insurers denied some experimental treatment to her.

The woman was sobbing and was trying to advocate her position through sobs.

Okay. Before you paint me as a completely uncompassionate person, I feel for the woman. Yes, it's sad. It's horrible when bad stuff happens to someone you love, and it's even worse when some bureaucracy seems designed to prevent you from getting the help that person needs.

But I don't want to see her sobbing on network tv. Because I look at it and I say to myself, "The producers of that story want me to feel a particular way. They want my heartstrings to be tugged. They want me to be angry at the insurance company and sad for the woman. They might even want me to shed a few sympathetic tears with her."

And I don't like feeling like I'm being manipulated into something. And to me, it feels like putting a grieving person on the evening news and rolling the camera while they state their position through tears is exploitative of that person. Oh, they might not feel that - they might feel just the opposite. But it seems like exploitation to me.

Okay, I'm going to 'fess up here: I'm very uncomfortable with displaying strong emotion in public. I would rather remove my own fingernails with a pair of pliers than cry in front of my colleagues. (I also don't "do" anger well...I'm more prone, when really angry, to say, "Excuse me, I need to cool down for a few minutes" and go for a walk until I'm less angry).

But anyway. When I see someone crying on the network news - or someone angry and ranting - my B.S. sensors tend to go off. Whether or not that's always justified, they do. I tend to associate use of strong emotion in otherwise "factual" information-conveyage as "they are appealing to my emotions which mean they make me want to feel a certain way whether or not it is the 'best' way or whether or not there are some serious consequences to what is being promoted."

Because, I suspect that the crying-mother piece was couched in a larger story of "we really, really must do something about health care in the U.S." And those stories often tend to trend towards "Let's have the government take it over."

And while there are some pluses to that, there are also an awful lot of drawbacks. I've had enough dealings with enough governmental agencies (and not just the IRS) to know that bureaucracy tends to devolve into something with the goal of maintaining the bureaucracy rather than helping the people the bureaucracy was originally designed to help. (It's almost a "selfish gene" type situation - The Bureaucracy Must Keep Going At All Costs!)

Also - considering that most folks in government have a spotty understanding at best of science, I could see the people in Congress being swayed into voting for governmental support for various forms of "woo" medicine (as some of the skeptic sites call it - I'm talking about stuff like using "healing colored lights" and the things where someone waves their hands over a person to draw out the bad energy). Or the government deciding the best way to make us all "healthy" is to require men to weigh no more than 200 lbs. and women to weigh no more than 150. Or ban the consumption of red meat. Or some such thing.

But anyway. I don't like it when the news uses "human interest" to make us FEEL something rather than to make us CONSIDER the different sides of the coin.

If I watch news at all in the early afternoon, I tend to go with FOX news. Oh, they have their own slips - I'll talk about one momentarily - but they are more prone to put COMMENTATORS on. Guys like Charles Krauthammer or Juan Williams, people whose job it is to think and to make reasoned arguments and who generally don't make the appeal to the emotions of the viewer. And it seems that there's a better chance of seeing all sides of a story when that's the way information is presented, as opposed to finding someone who feels strongly about one dimension of something, and having them go up on camera, the less-polished, the better.

And I admit - FOX is far from perfect. They slip up in a lot of ways. I hate it when some pretty white woman goes missing, because then FOX turns into the "Find Her!" channel. And then the "Speculation on who did her in!" channel. And then it's the "Outrage that someone could harm a pretty white woman!" channel.

And they were also one of the big outlets that showed the dad of the kid who got shot in - was it New Jersey? The case where the black man saw a group of white kids coming to his house to harass his son, and he got fearful and trigger-happy, and shot one of the guys, and the guy died? And he wound up getting a very light sentence for it?

And then the father of the kid who was killed - and I totally understand his anger and his frustration (though again I wonder if we were given the whole story) - belts out the F word and the MF word and lots of other words that were bleeped, but you could still kinda tell what they were, and then semi-threatened the life of the black guy.

But the anger of the man was a little scary, and I think showing it did little to advance the story (they could have simply had the newsreader say something like, "The father of the dead man succumbed to an angry outburst in which he criticized the justice system" or somesuch).

I have to admit - I was up visiting my folks at the time that that came out - I almost turned to them and said, "If I'm ever killed in a horrible and violent way, and the person who killed me gets a light sentence, please don't respond like that." Oh, I know they wouldn't, but what a cringey thing to consider.

Sometimes I think the modern version of "bread and circuses" is the 24 hour news cycle - with its shots of improvised memorials (complete with flowers and teddy bears) somewhere that there's been a tragedy, or its sobbing relatives, or the people showing frothing, unhinged anger on it.

One of the dystopian novels I've read over the years - I can't now remember if it was from 1984, Brave New World, or The Handmaid's Tale - had a bit where there was something that was called something like a "20 minute hate" where people herded together in an area and were encouraged to get as angry and as hateful towards some pre-determined topic or person as possible - and it was almost this weird hypnotic thing; everyone was encouraged to join in. It was almost as if people were being made to feel more strongly, as some kind of cohesiveness or propaganda exercise, than they might otherwise.

And I found that a little scary. Yes, I know about the madness of crowds and groupthink and all that, but I don't like the idea that the leaders would think it a good idea to hypnotize people into feeling something that might be counter to what they'd otherwise feel - or to feel something that, if they were given the chance to THINK about it, they'd either not feel as strongly or not feel at all.

But sometimes I wonder about the news. I don't like getting the sensation of "They want me to cry at this part" or "they want me to be very angry right here."

It's a little different with books and movies (though I have read books and seen movies where the whole cathartic experience thing was badly-enough done that I felt manipulated and got irritated with them) - that's supposed to be emotionally moving, and the story is what's important. It's not like facts are being subverted in the name of making you "feel" when it's a novel...you know, on some level, it's fiction.

But I tend to feel like the news shouldn't slide over into the territory of telling people how to feel about issues.