Media HYPE! The End Is Near!!
I keep hearing all the hype about how things have never been this bad! And these are the worst times ever! And the end is near! And endless blurbs of other such nonsense.
To help some of you put things in perspective I threw together just a few tidbits of information. This should help you to calm down and catch your breath.
Pre 1920’s:
1857, toilet paper was invented. I included this first one just to get your attention. Just imagine the world before toilet paper. Really! Think about it.
1914 – 17, World War 1, estimated deaths, 38 MILLION.
1918, World Wide flu epidemic, estimated 75 million deaths.
1920’s :
Slavery had ended in US only 60 years ago. Segregation for Black America was still a way of life. Integration is still just a dream.
1920, Bubonic plague hits India. Hundreds of thousands died.
1929, Shootings in Chicago: St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Fourteen members of a Chicago gang are shot to death in a warehouse on orders from Al Capone.
1929, Stock Market Crash: Black Tuesday. The bull market of the late 1920s comes to a crashing end. Between September 3 and December 1, stocks declined $26 billion in value.
1929 – 1939, The Great Depression hits. It was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world.
1930s:
1939 – 1945, WWII: estimated deaths, 75 million. By the way… this was orchestrated by a real Nazi, not a made up by the media Nazi.
1940’s:
1940, Draft: The military draft age was lowered from 21 to 18 years old. One and a half million people are drafted into the military.
1945, 2 Atomic Bombs dropped over Japan. 80,000 people dead.
1950’s:
Korean War, 1950 – 53, estimated deaths, 2 million.
1950, Politician, Andrew McCarthy began destroying lives of hundreds of Americans who HE proclaimed to be un-American.
1955 – 1975, Vietnam War, estimated deaths, 2 million.
1960’s & 1970’s:
1963, President John F. Kennedy assassinated.
1965, Malcolm X assassinated.
1968, Robert Kennedy assassinated.
1968, Martin Luther King assassinated.
1968, Asian flu, 2 million deaths.
1970, Protest broke out across the nation. Four students were murdered by the government at Kent State University.
1972, Terrorist attack at Munich Olympics, 9 Olympians murdered.
1974, President Richard Nixon resigns under weight of scandal.
1979, Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant meltdown.
1980’s & 1990’s:
1980’s to present, Aids, 30 million deaths.
1980, John Lennon murdered.
1981, President Ronald Reagan shot.
1990, fist Gulf War starts after Iraq invades Kuwait.
1991, Soviet Union Collapses.
1991, Public access became available for the World Wide Web.
1995, Oklahoma City bombing, 168 deaths.
1992, Hurricane Andrew destroys South Florida.
1998, President Bill Clinton admits to having inappropriate sexual relations with an intern after masturbating on her in the Oval Office.
1999, Columbine School shooting, 13 dead.
2000’s:
2000, VP Al Gore concedes the Presidential election and then changes his mind, leading to over a month of court proceedings and political wrangling before Gore concedes again for a final time.
2001, US attacked on US soil for the first time in modern history. Islamic Extremist killed over 3000 Americans.
2003, US invades Iraq.
2004, Facebook Created thus creating an atmosphere that fosters the notion that the most tragic day in history is always today, with tomorrow certainly being worse than today. Within a decade, all major news media follows suit. The tragic end is near, or so we are constantly told.
2020, Donald Trump won’t stop tweeting. This is somehow is being compared as equal to all the issues above, with the media hype concluding that his tweets are far worse than the sum total of all previous tragedies. If the tweets don't stop, the world as we know it will end!!
My friends, Media Hype is just noise that should be ignored. Go to the beach. Have a rum drink. Watch the waves. Stay cool.
Life is short and gets one day shorter each and every day.