Stories - FD Thornton

  After about three weeks in on my “Ignorance Is Bliss Tour”, which involved no national news and very little TV and Social media time. I was giving my mind a break from the amount of dopamine it was receiving. Till last night when I fell asleep just after dinner. Even as I spent the evening listening to the latest political novel, it didn’t seem to bother my rest at all. And do you want to know why?   ​ Because this clown show we call politics hasn’t changed a lick since I started voting in the early 1980s. What has changed is our insatiable need for hits of dopamine, that natural little drug (for lack of a better word) that fires up our pleasure sensors. I’ve been doing my damnest to pull myself away from that little booger. Allowing my mind instead to focus on silence and interesting conversation. I started going to the local Senior Center, if for nothing else but to soak up the atmosphere of community.   ​ For far too long for those of us on the left and the right...

  Waking up this morning, for some reason I decided to bring up my daily newspaper on the big screen to read while putting my medicine together. What I had forgotten about was the reason I decided not to read my digital newspaper in the first place. No better than the headlines screaming across my TV on news channels were the headlines of doom and gloom. It meant that if I wanted any sliver of cited information, I was going to have to dig deep. So I turned the app off and went back to real life, finishing a call to my urologist about a prescription. It seems like even reputable news sources have jumped on the hype-train to catch more views and subscribers, while the forces of FB, TT, and 24-hour news all fight for our limited attention spans. It doesn’t seem that long ago when I’d see my dad or granddad at the kitchen table, their heads buried intently between the pages of the Savannah Morning News or The Evening Press respectively. Even as a kid, I’d ask for the comic strip ...