This post was inspired by a conversation with some church members last night while we were at a function to cook dinner for a children's charity. I don't mean to call anyone out, the conversation just surprised me. I go to a fairly small Methodist church that has an incredibly active membership. They do a lot of good work on many fronts to help people in our region and in other parts of the world. Last night, while standing around watching one of our members grill burgers at this event, several of us were talking about a variety of things. The subject of watching the news came up. I think what spurred it was talk about a horrible truck crash that happened last week in our area. One of the people said he doesn't watch the news... at all... because, "there's nothing good on the news." To my surprise, most of the people standing there agreed. Most of them, it seems, don't watch the news.
Now I understand how people can be turned off by all the negativity on both local and national TV news. I understand how the persistent negativity actually stresses some people out because they feel overwhelmed, and sometimes really fearful, about all the bad things happening in this world. But we are in a period of time where the world is changing rapidly and dramatically on virtually every level. If you want to be functional in today's world, you have to have some sense of what's going on. One thing that really bugs me about North Carolina is that the local, regional, and state leaders seem to still be operating from a 20th century, industrial age, point of view. They seem to make decisions based on the way things worked 40 or 50 years ago. Because of this, they are spending millions of dollars to try and get a major auto manufacturing plant to locate somewhere in NC to put people a few thousand people back to work. But they're not spending a similar amount of money to encourage 21st century entrepreneurship, which has an even greater chance of creating a large number of good jobs here. Teacher pay in NC is 42nd in the nation, according to a ranking I heard the other day, so education is not a major priority here. The energy lobbies here are fighting solar and wind farms. The list of old ideas goes on and on. To top it off, a recent news report said unemployment is starting to edge higher in the state, which seemed to baffle everyone.
Could this reluctance to embrace today's world and today's technology be happening in part because so many people here simply don't watch the news? I, personally, watch several TV news programs each day, and am always reading books and listening to online speeches and talks about the future of business, technology, communication, and society in general. Few, if any, of the people I talk to day to day, do the same. They are simply not aware that there is a brain drain in this country, where the smartest people coming out of college are heading to the U.S.'s mega-cities. No one I know here is aware of the growth of mega-regions around this country and the world, which are simultaneously killing off many former industrial small cities and towns, including the region where I now live. In effect, most of the communities in this U.S. are being run by the intellectual "2nd and 3rd string," as the smartest people migrate to the best jobs in big cities. No one I deal with daily is familiar with professor Richard Florida's concept of "the Creative Class," the documented theory that today's best tech people and entrepreneurs are clustering in areas of "Technology, Talent, and Tolerance," as Florida puts it. It's no news flash that the American South is not the most tolerant place, as the recent rebel flag controversy points out. But these days, tolerance of fringe groups of people is not just a cultural issue, it's an economic development issue with huge ramifications.
I keep my mouth shut most of the time with the people I interact with day to day, because they just don't spend the time I do learning about future trends. But these trends to affect all of our daily lives. Maybe watching and clicking on, and reading, and listening to various news sources is one of the ways people everywhere can begin to improve their own regions. How much do you pay attention to what's happening in the world today? Does an avoidance of news affect your life in a negative way? I'll let you ponder that idea today.
No comments:
Post a Comment