What the hell is the point?

I feel the need to express my feeling of impotence.

My sisters (always my sisters, never my brothers) have been giving me guff for several years: they think I should read the newspaper and remain informed about the state of the world. I have begun to do this regularly in the last few weeks. I started by following the story from Myanmar, about the monks and rising gas prices and the junta killing people who want basic human rights and maybe some democracy. Monks are sacred in Myanmar, and they are being detained by the government for saying and doing things that are protected by law in our country. Then there was the whole Blackwater thing, and then more civilian deaths in Iraq at the hands of contractor companies, and these are just the ones that have made it into the New York Times. There was Benazir Bhutto returning to Pakistan and over one hundred people dying as a result. She knew there were going to be suicide bombers in response to her highly publicized return, and then she blamed the Pakistani government for not responding appropriately, when she could have come back quietly and then announced her return afterward, avoiding huge crowds assembling and getting blown up. And these are just the stories that are sticking out of my memory twenty minutes after waking up.

What brought this on? Well, I woke up, walked to the kitchen, poured myself some coffee, added milk and brown sugar to it, put it in the microwave to make it really really hot, and then walked over to the kitchen table where the paper was. Just looking at it made me depressed. So depressed, in fact, that I am not reading it; I am blogging about it. Why does remaining informed seem so important? So I can notice that the only clothes available to me to buy are from Cambodian sweatshops? So I can hate myself and the world? So I can feel four thousand pounds of empathy without being able to make a difference? This is not living. And yet because of the judgments of my sisters, I will probably keep reading the stupid paper, and I will keep yelling at it when I get emotional about all the nice people dying in horrible circumstances because Americans (and others) are stupid.

Okay, I gotta go read the paper.

(Parenthetically, what the fuck is up with my spell check, which did not flag 'gotta', but did flag 'okay'?)