I saw some headline about how students at some school, Berkeley I believe, had joined arms and surrounded the front entrance to the school, and would only allow non-white students to go through, forcing white students to go around and enter the back way, or something to that effect. I felt the all-too-familiar-at-that-point boiling rage enter my mind—this was an outrage! a clumsy attempt at making a political statement about racism, enacted through an act of mass racism. did these idiots not understand that they're not making things better for anyone, that their actions served only to divide rather than unite?! how could they not see this, it was so obvious?!? I could feel my blood start to boil: rrrrRRRRRAAAAUUUUUGHH—
suddenly, I had this moment of clarity out of nowhere, as though from God Himself: I was fully aware, somewhere in the back of my mind, that the whole point of this stunt was to cause outrage locally, and the whole point of the article about it was to spread the outrage globally, even though the article reporting on the event was politically opposed to the actions the students had taken. yet, in the end, their goal was the same: to cause outrage!
woah. "both sides" here want to cause me to be outraged, and here my dumb ass was, just letting it happen. why should I oblige either party? was I really so simple and manipulable that just seeing some words and photos on a screen about something dumb and wholly irrelevant to my own personal daily life could work me up this much? what the hell was wrong with me? why did I let myself fall for this bullshit?
since that day, I have never once felt that familiar blood-boiling rage as the result of reading a headline or news article again. I can't really explain it but something just clicked in my head that day, giving me insight into just how emotionally manipulative pretty much all "news" so obviously is, and how, once I was made consciously aware of this phenomenon, it was really on me to consent to this blatant emotional manipulation—which, I then realized, I had totally been doing for years at that point!
I had nearly forgotten about this having ever happened until recently a very close friend saw a news article about something that had happened over a decade ago, politically framed such that it was relevant to contemporary politics, and it significantly emotionally affected him in a way that reminded me all too much about my past self. I talked him through this story and showed him how much better off I was today now that I choose to refuse to let news headlines and even stories massively emotionally affect me. it took awhile to talk him down from his irrationally outraged state but in the end he calmed down, heard what I had to say, and thanked me profusely for the perspective I gave him, as, much like the story that outraged me years ago, this too had caught him completely off-guard such that before he knew it he was an emotional mess, all because of something he read on the Internet, about something that had happened over a decade prior.