Confessions of a 9-11 Addict
ad·dict
To devote or surrender (oneself) to something habitually or obsessively.
September 11, 2001. If you could be near a TV set that morning, it was impossible not to be glued to it. The usual din of rush hour was hushed as people tuned in to the insanity in the US. Levels of productivity reached near zero throughout the continent. Cities gasped at what they were witnessing on their sets.
Many said, “It was like watching a movie.”
My mind was intoxicated with the images and sound bites provided by television, but like a true media addict I wanted more. I turned to the Web, which was even more chaotic and rife with rumour. Servers and networks choked and sputtered due the intense increase in traffic. I listened to radio but it could only narrate what TV networks were showing live.
I’ve been here before. That Friday evening while I watched OJ in the back of the Ford Bronco. The tracer fire lighting up night vision video beamed in from Baghdad. The time I stayed up half the night glued to CNN while forces mobilized in Panama. My birthday, January 28,1986, when the Challenger Space Shuttle came down in flames.
America’s times of crisis became TV spectacles I could not get enough of.
During the wild opening hours of these events, the mind tries to comprehend what is happening. Question after question occurs to you and no one can supply the answers. Commentators try their best but they are often as ill informed as you are.
For days after the attack I was still starving for information. Second-rate security hacks provided as much comfort as the highbrow observations of Charlie Rose, Pete Hamill and Bill Moyers.
For me this media consumption had gone way beyond the simple need to know. It was about being stimulated – the adrenaline highs of witnessing so much destruction, and the mournful lows of seeing a population devastated.
Reason is the first casualty during a crisis. Although I have spent a good deal of my life studying how mass communications affects us, I’m just as easily influenced by the tilt of the media message.
Russians lay flowers outside the American embassy in Moscow and it lays me out. Iranians send condolences to the US, and pour onto the streets with candlelight vigils. Old adversaries find common cause, and it’s all deeply affecting.
Real life takes a back seat to media consumption during these times. I know the gang at Adbusters are wagging their finger at people like me but, jeezuz, I’m hooked. I get a buzz from the swirl of information and innuendo and I cannot walk away from it.
This kind of electronic gorging cannot continue without consequences. It was starting to make me miserable actually, and I had to kick the habit. I’ve never taken part in a 12-step program, but I needed to create one in order to break the cycle of media dependency.
With all my fortitude here now are the 12 steps by which I must abide:
- Admit that you are powerless over your dependency on cable.
- Come to believe there is a Higher Power, and that He is not Peter Jennings.
- Make a decision to turn your will and your life over to the care of Jon Stewart, when he isn’t crying on The Daily Show.
- Make a searching and fearless personal inventory of your immediate family, and others you have ignored.
- Admit to your Higher Power, to yourself, and to another human being, just how much Larry King you were exposed to.
- Be entirely ready to remove all CNBC from your life.
- Humbly ask your spouse to remove the remote control from your hand, and hide the damn thing where you won’t find it.
- Make a list of all persons you have lost touch with, and be willing to e-mail them.
- Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would require video conferencing.
- Continue to take an interest in libraries, bookstores and other foreign places.
- Seek through jogging and long walks to improve your conscious contact with neighbours, local shops, parks and other stuff beyond the living room.
- Bathe regularly.
My name is Michael Klassen, and I have to get a life.
