Gaza

I don’t read newspapers.

I rarely watch the news.

I didn’t pay attention in geography, like AT ALL.

The only way I ever find out anything new is google, youtube, and good ol word of mouth.

So lately I’ve been hearing a lot about the Gaza Strip,  and I know many of you reading this will call me a complete idiot for not taking more of an interest in world events, well to those people I say “read my last blog, I don’t have a bank account either.”.  So I thought I would do a little research to explain a little bit about this strange thing they call the Gaza strip…

First of all when I hear the term “Gaza Strip”, I think about a stretch of road just outside town where you can buy liquor, porn, and lot lizzards.  Actually, when you think about it, it sorta is like “the strip”, well not in it’s practices.  Not that I know of at least… unless thats where egypt goes to buy beer?  It’s not part of any other country really, it sits all alone by itself.

World events are like watching “lost” or “heroes”, if you don’t pay attention from the beginning it really doesn’t make any sense.  From what I can gather the Gaza Strip has been passed around from power to power since basically the beginning of time.  EVERYONE’s had the Gaza Strip, baby.

Really, again, I know nothing about the conflict in the Gaza Strip.  I didn’t know much about Darfur when that was going on either.  What I do notice is people seem to WANT bad things to happen there.  They WANT something to watch on the news.  They touched on this on one of my favorite shows (no, not Roseanne) Boston Legal.

The term is Schadenfreude. Schadenfreude is the term for pleasure taken from observing misery in others.  It’s like a secret pleasure that people take, usually en masse.  It’s the same feeling people would get when they would burn witches, but now we don’t have to cast the stones ourselves we can watch it all in the comfort of our homes with our TV dinners and canned soda.

I’m getting a hefty dose of schadenfreude right now as I watch Jerry Springer.  It’s a bit of an adrenaline rush to watch the lowest rung of society find out that their mate screwed the babysitter that lives in an RV at the end of the trailer park and beat the living shit out of each other.

Jerry comes on every morning after Roseanne and me being the Schadenfreude junky I am it’s hard to change the channel but still I manage to.  Well, most of the time at least.  Every now and then I can see the real pain in some of their eyes and it’s shocking to me that I actually enjoyed watching it.