Things Wrong With the World

Call me insane, call me sleep-deprived, call me over-sensitive, but this stuff just shouldn't be happening.

I saw a ten year old reading New Moon at the feis this weekend.  Absolutely disgusting and entirely not appropriate.

Obama dropped his demand that Israel cease building settlements in the Occupied Territories.  Excuse me?  Haven't those been declared illegal by pretty much everyone who matters?  The settlements are one of the true roadblocks to Middle Eastern peace, and it's sad that Obama is willing to bend to pressure from the Israelis (because Prime Minister Netanyahu is the one being unreasonable here.  Did anyone read his conditions for a Palestinian state that came out earlier this year?)

Iranian police are starting to order shopkeepers that any mannequins they have in their store windows be wearing proper hijab.  This is how ridiculous this is:  It showed up as a headline in the LA Times Twitter feed I have in my Google reader, and I thought I had accidentally hit the Onion's Twitter feed.  So I started laughing.  Until I realized it was real.  Stuff like this leaves me speachless with shock over how badly women are treated, and how unable we are to put a stop to it.

Speaking of Iran, President Ahmadinijad has been denying the Holocaust.  Again.  How blind to you have to be to stare all that evidence in the face and say it's faked?  Such hatred and such stupidity.

An off-duty police officer was driving drunk in NYC and killed a woman.  How can you not know better?

Stuff like this makes me want to curl up in a corner with my eyes shut tight, waiting for things to improve.  But if this is ever going to change . . . we have to get out there and make it change!

Priorities?

Sometimes I wonder what's wrong with the world, and why people (Americans especially) have such a hard time figuring out their priorities. For example, if you asked me to name some of the most important events going on over the past month or so, you would get a list that looks a bit like this:

• The Costa Rican president is still trying to mediate between the two sides involved in the Honduras coup
• India and Pakistan have agreed to resume negotiations over the Kashmir region; U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is in India right now
• Police are investigating a double suicide bombing in Indonesia
• Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings are continuing in the Senate, she looks to be facing a clear road to being the first Latina Supreme Court justice
• The CIA is under fire, again, for keeping secrets from Congress
• California is still in a huge budget crisis.
• Sarah Palin announced she would step down as governor of Alaska

Pop quiz, how many of you already knew about at least 4 of those? I bet you not very many. Now, wouldn't you expect stories like that to be dominating pages such as Google News? Well, okay, they're dominating my heavily customized news.google.ie page. Switch to a non-personalized news.google.com, however, and you get a much different sight. Suddenly the page is dominated by Michael Jackson (seriously, who cares anymore? Too many people!), Harry Potter, Jon Gosselin, and Walter Cronkite. Switch to charter.net, and suddenly the top searches are "Emmy Nominations", "British Open", and "Jessica Simpson".

People, really? No wonder Americans are regarded as idiots in so many other countries! We are, if this is all that's important to us! We need to start taking more of an active interest in the world around us. For one day (and then hopefully many more) put aside the celebrity news (which is just the same stories applied to different people over and over again, I hope you realize!) and read -- actually, attentively read some type of international news. Then go out, find one person, and tell them about whatever event you just read about. How many of you can say that you've done this before? Think about it. Think about where your priorities should be. I dare you.