What's Relevant Day to Day?

We’ve had some interesting current events already this year, with Russia annexing the Crimea, with our premiere resigning her post, an aircraft disappearing with over 200 souls, UFO sightings in my small town, what more could a person need as fodder for an article?  Yet the question is, what is relevant day to day?  What do people read, absorb, talk about, care about or remember?  The answer seems to be that people care about their family first, their work second and whatever remains for them to focus on is perhaps a hobby such as the latest hockey game results.  Few people care about headlines except as something to discuss at the water cooler for 5 minutes, then it’s on to something else “more relevant”.

Those who govern us (and I use the word loosely) recognizes this fact about us, our willingness to be ostriches with the world at large therefore they are successful in achieving their agendas.  If you look through history you can see the patterns and you can see the pendulum swing albeit in very wide arc from suppression to liberation.  The trouble is that the John Does of this world never truly escape their ostrich-like existence except for those few moments when they cry out “enough already”.  Very quickly they assume their complacent mantle and plod along caring for their families and hoping that things go back to being like the good old days.

In mainstream media one rarely reads left-leaning stories and sadly few try to pursue the stories via the internet.  The fact is the stories are easy to retrieve if you just know where to look or what questions to pose on Google.  This past week one such rare individual, Tony Benn, passed away in Great Britain.  Here’s a wonderful quote from him on democracy.

“In the course of my life I have developed five little democratic questions. If one meets a powerful person — Adolf Hitler, Joe Stalin or Bill Gates — ask them five questions: ‘What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?’ If you cannot get rid of the people who govern you, you do not live in a democratic system.”