ON THIS DAY - HEADLINES
News Item #1 - 3 siblings that had been on a crime spree around the United States were finally captured in Colorado today. They range in age from 21 to 29. One sibling has 5 felonies on her record - three of them hit-and-runs. One sibling has had 14 felony convictions since 2007. Together these three robbed a bank in Georgia, tried to kill an officer in Florida, and shot numerous times at police during a 20-mile high-speed chase in Colorado before finally being captured. Its good that they are captured. It's good that they are not shooting randomly at innocent people. But the question on my mind is this: WHAT happened during these three people's childhoods that was so bad that all three ended up turning to lives of crime? What kind of nightmares did they endure that would lead them to this lifestyle? How did their parents, their community, their schools fail them? Is this what happens when damaged children fall through the cracks? Or, did they have perfect childhoods, and if they did then what caused all three of them to make these decisions? While everyone will be focused on their crimes and their punishments, I hope someone will ask about their pasts.
News Item #2 - Summary
At 8:53 tonight, CNN had 18 items listed under their "Latest News" section. The list included one item on Syria, the crime-spree siblings, the sentencing of a murderer, a story about an Adventist school teacher murdered by a student, half a dozen items that barely qualified as "news" and the rest of the list consisted of telling us that Sarah Palin is driving her bus to the Iowa State Fair, J Lo is going to be a judge on Idol, someone is joining the cast of a TV series, and one item asking if a new fall TV series is too racy.
I went to Foxnews.com to see what the other side was covering. Their "Latest News" section contained 16 items. Two of these items were news polls, one headline announced that Apple is now a more valuable company than Exxon, Sesame Street is apparently going to allow Bert & Ernie to get married, some woman in Pennsylvania let her 6-yr old niece drive, the arrest of the Florida siblings, a couple political stories, and oh horrors, sex education is now a mandatory subject in NYC schools.
Really? This is NEWS? Children are starving to death in Somalia, women are being treated inhumanely in Afghanistan, human suffering still rages in Darfur, people continue to die in Iraq and we see nothing about it unless you dig through several layers of web pages to intentionally look for them. We in this country are so oblivious to what's happening in the rest of the world - its as if the rest of the world really doesn't matter. It's as if the news organizations don't believe we'll read the stories if they cover them. If the "news" organizations spent half as much time informing us about the rest of the world as they do creating fake news about rich people behaving badly, or trying to create controversy over things that don't really matter, we might actually pull our heads out of the sand and see what's happening around us and maybe even find ways to get involved and try to change the world for the better. But we have to care enough to want to know what's happening outside our borders. If all we want is the fake news that's all they'll continue to feed us.
ON THIS DAY - HISTORICAL EVENTS
On August 10, 1945, one day after we dropped an atom bomb on Nagasaki, Japan announced its willingness to surrender - as long as their emperor retained his status.
On this day in 1988, President Reagan signed a measure that provided $20,000 payments to Japanese-Americans who were interned by the U.S. government during World War II.
The bombs we dropped on Japan resulted in 90,000–166,000 deaths in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 deaths in Nagasaki. Here in the U.S. we sent over 110,000 people of Japanese heritage to internment camps where they were forced to remain from 1942 to 1945, some as late as 1946. As they were released each internee was given $25 and a train ticket home.
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