The Spectacle of the Obvious
Sometimes I glance at the headlines that pop up on my phone—just out of habit, maybe out of boredom. Drunk driving. A robbery. A stabbing. A political scandal, again. The usual loop of local dysfunction. And every time I see it, I think: Why are people still reading this?
Is this really what we call news?
It’s not that I’m uninformed. I do what I need to do to stay minimally oriented. I might scan the front page of an international paper, glance at a few headlines, get the basic pulse of the world. Trump raised import taxes. A new conflict is brewing somewhere. That's enough. A glimpse—not a dive. I don’t read the full articles. I don’t need to. I can smell the direction of the wind without dissecting every leaf that blows across the street.
But local news? That’s a different beast.
That’s where the illusion becomes grotesque.
It’s not journalism. It’s repetition. Drunk driver. House break-in. Another youth brawl. The newspaper becomes a daily catalog of everything we already know is wrong—a spectacle of the obvious, paraded like revelation.
Don’t we all know by now that drinking and driving is stupid and reckless?
Don’t we know these robberies are happening because the government refuses to control the borders or protect its own citizens?
Don’t we already know that politics often attracts the wrong kind of people?
And don’t we already know that these self-serving politicians have long since broken the social contract with their citizens?
And yet people sit there, coffee in hand, consuming this decay as if reading about it somehow does something. As if information alone is virtue. But they don’t pressure the government. They don’t speak up. They don’t change the way they live. They read about a fire and then go back to sleep in a wooden house.
Over 150 years ago, Henry David Thoreau saw this pattern starting to take root.
He wrote:
“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
Even in his time, Thoreau saw the difference between communication and content. Between the machinery of news and the soul of truth. And he didn’t need a smartphone to sense that people were becoming addicted to the appearance of knowing, rather than the work of acting.
If Thoreau lived today, he wouldn’t be impressed by the speed of our networks. He’d be appalled by their emptiness.
And here’s the uncomfortable part:
Reading the news has become a substitute for responsibility.
It gives people the feeling of awareness without demanding any change. It’s moral fast food. You get your daily hit of outrage, fear, or self-righteousness, and then go on doing nothing.
You feel like you’ve participated in society—but you haven’t. You’ve just watched it sink.
So what should people be doing instead?
They should be living with intention.
Asking better questions.
Forming alliances.
Holding institutions accountable.
Raising children who think and feel and see.
They should be building new structures where the old ones are failing. Speaking out, not just reading silently. Voting with their actions, not just their ballots.
And most of all, they should stop mistaking information for meaning.
Because truth is not found in the repetition of the obvious.
It’s found in the courage to step beyond the spectacle and actually live differently.