raw

I've been a news hound since I was a teenager, always reading the newspaper avidly and subscribing to various news magazines. I never found it boring or dry. We currently subscribe to two newspapers and several magazines, and up until recently we regularly read them.

I barely look at them now. I still don't find it boring. But for the first time in my life, I need to tune out the news.

I feel exposed now. Vulnerable, I suppose. I don't read the news so much anymore as I feel it. I hear about a car bombing in Iraq, and I see the mothers who have lost their children. I've had dreams about nuclear proliferation, repeated nightmares about global warming gone amok. Even the traffic report isn't safe: there might have been a traffic accident, and somebody might have been hurt or killed, and that person might have parents somewhere that are aching for him.

Right now, my boy is small, and I can hold him and sing to him and mostly keep the world away. But each day inexorably brings closer the time when he will step out on his own, headed out into the world with its suicide bombers and rampant pollution and wars and red-light-running drivers.

Will I ever be able to read the news again?