Open Your Ears and Hear the News

By Nathaniel Greenhall
Staff Writer

There comes a time in a person’s life when you realize you have no idea what’s going on in the world. That’s when you need to start listening to what people have to say about the world. Read the news, listen to the radio, or watch the news. These are three great ways of finding out things that are going on around you, on a day-to-day basis.

I realized that throughout my life I never cared much about what was going on in the world. I thought that it never concerned me and that the news was boring. After my 20th birthday last year I started to work at a Mobil gas station. While working there I started to pick up the newspaper when business was slow. After reading it for a couple of weeks, I realized what I had been missing out on. There are too many things happening in the world, and it’s an insult not to know what’s going on.

I feel that it’s very important for people over the age of 18 to start reading the news. Maybe when you were younger the news didn’t matter much, because all you cared about was the immediate world around you. Once you are a college student you need to realize that the real world is right around the corner. All of the decisions being made in the world are going to affect you more and more as you age. The news is full of information on changing laws, taxes, job opportunities, traffic, and hazardous reports, all of these things can help you on a day to day basis.

People who pay attention to the news closely see things coming before others do. The economic crisis was something that people thought was coming because certain signs pointed to this happening. My father reads the news regularly and he told me that all of this was going to happen at least a month before it really did.

Especially with all of the important things going on in the world recently that are going to have a huge impact in the coming years. As you start forming your life and a family, all of these economic situations come into play. If you don’t read the news and have no idea at all that there even is an economic crisis, how are you going to deal with life situations appropriately? Not only is the news something that everyone needs to make good decisions, but it is a great wealth of knowledge for starting conversations. Not only can it help you fit into conversations, but it can make you come off as worldly and well informed.

The people out there that are writing the news are doing a great charity by informing us on local and world news, and people are taking it for granted. News used to be something that was only local, news from far away came days if not weeks after it already happened because it took time to transport information. Nowadays news is literally instantaneous, you can hear people reporting from across the world live on TV, or the Internet.

If you are like me, the news is just too boring to watch sometimes. You can join the other thousands of people who tune into the Daily Show with John Stewart, or the Colbert Report. While they tend to exaggerate on certain topics they also give great portrayals of news. The two of them are looking at it from a different point of view than normal newscasters. And to some people this makes the difference in paying attention to what is going on in the world.

So news is something that we all need to pay attention to. And not just for the sake of ourselves, but for our families to come. What’s the point of living in America, if you don’t know what’s going on in it?