The phone vibrated slightly as the screen yawned to luminescent life. “9 dead in India bus crash,” the “alert” read.
It was both startling, and infuriating. If news alerts had forms, this one would be an intelligent but completely untrained eight-year-old boy, running up to me as I was having my tea and reflecting, knocking over a vase and easel, to breathlessly sputter out some grotesquely inappropriate thing he had seen by the creek. If news alerts had forms, I would have slapped this one with a wet sea bass.
Whoever published the alert is, hopefully, an adult. I am an adult. Why am I, a thousand miles away from India, being told this? What could I possibly do that would outweigh the efforts of the local townspeople? Do I speak Hindi? Do I know the mayor? Do I even know to whom I would address a letter of outrage over the bus company’s gross incompetence and dubious safety record?
No.
I am from Trenton, New Jersey. I know the mayor, the governor, and the library director, and I want to be inundated with alerts every time they even so much as misaddress a postcard.
I want to know exactly who signs the checks for Trenton Central High School’s $100m “reconstruction.” I want to know Thomas Jefferson Elementary School’s test scores, pre and post-razing. I want an alert every time Charles McKenna says or does anything. I want to know what Mayor Eric Jackson is doing to wrest my city from the tentacles of tyranny and avarice – from the corner, to the courthouse. I want to know every comment Governor Christie makes about “that school” from his gold-domed office in ‘that’ city.
I want to be told every time President Barack Hussein Obama signs an executive order authorizing the killing of American citizens, on American soil. I want to know how many Americans were killed today in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Planned Parenthood. I want to know how many Lakotas froze to death today in their own ancestral homeland. I want to know how many “enemies” we hated enough to kill by computer, but not enough to condemn in court. I want to know how many birth certificates were recorded today with only one adult name.
Every time I receive a news alert about something I cannot change, I lose sight of another thing I can.
American Abaya 