A world distracted - no awareness of Korea compared with Wikileaks

I was speaking with my friend Maha about her general dissatisfaction with the state of the news. We are headed toward war on the Korean peninsula, and the world is instead focused on the water cooler talk of some diplomats.

Julian Assange is a terrorist of information, dropping bombs of unfiltered, questionably relevant data in ways guaranteed to get him maximum publicity. He reminds me of Heath Ledger’s portrayal of The Joker – terrifyingly dangerous because of his willingness to do anything. Somebody so wild and brazen cannot be beaten by people who set limits on their behavior, and that’s scary.

But more frustrating, as Maha says, is that we are the problem. We pay attention and wrap our news cycle tightly around his pronouncements, desperate to watch drama unfold even as it destroys our sense of security and confounds our moral codes. We are rubberneckers on a highway, and the traffic we cause strangles the world.