Lansing City Pulse: The End of Reason
There was a time when the news didn’t come screaming at you from every glowing screen. You waited for it — in print, in black and white, in the morning. You trusted, at least a little, that the people telling the story cared about the truth more than the clicks.
Of course, bias has always been part of the deal. Even in the days of Emmett Till, when the country was still pretending that Black suffering was a matter of debate, we watched the machinery of lies churn. A white woman pointed a finger, said a boy whistled at her, and that was all it took to end his life. Her story unraveled decades later, but by then, the damage was irreversible — as it always is when truth arrives too late.
Then came television. The faces on the screen became our storytellers, our priests, our moral compass — or so we thought. But when Rodney King’s beating was caught on camera, some people still managed to see the violence and wonder what he did wrong. Seeing, it turned out, didn’t mean understanding.
Cable television didn’t just erode our faith in institutions — it eroded our attention spans.
Suddenly, the country that once prided itself on hard work and reason was binge-watching chaos: “The Jerry Springer Show,” Jenny Jones, Maury. We turned humiliation into a spectator sport. Capitalism, ever the opportunist, understood exactly what it was doing: giving the restless masses a distraction, something to make them feel superior for thirtyminutes at a time.
Then came the smartphone — the Pandora’s box ofmodern civilization. Now the entire world is in ourpocket, and so is every lie. People with no journalistic training, no ethical guardrails, and no sense of proportion found their audience. Algorithms took care of the rest. We’re now living in a custom-built hallucination, where every scroll reaffirms our worst instincts. Everyone has their own “truth,” their own “facts,” their own war to fight against imaginary enemies.
We’ve entered a kind of national cosplay, where citizens play soldier for causes they barely understand, armed with memes instead of muskets fighting shadowy conspiracies that only exist online. And all the while, the real problems — climate change, inequality, education, science — sit neglected, like unwanted children at the edge of a crowded room.
How do we escape this loop without surrendering to pseudoscience and magical thinking? There’s only one reality that matters, and it’s the one based in facts. But facts don’t trend. They don’t flatter our biases or soothe our fears. They demand effort, patience, humility — three things modern America seems to have misplaced.
I can’t shake the feeling that something is coming. A crash, a reckoning, a moment when all this digital noise meets the hard wall of reality. And when it does, too many innocent people will pay the price. We are our own worst enemy. Not because we lack intelligence, but because we traded curiosity for comfort. We could be devoting our collective brilliance to curing disease, saving the planet, or lifting people out of poverty. Instead, we’re trapped in the narcissism of grievance, worshipping a populist who mistakes his personal vendettas for patriotism.
America once dreamed big. Now it doom-scrolls. And if history has a sense of humor — and it always does — the last sound we’ll hear before it all collapses won’t be a warning siren or a speech. It’ll be the gentle ping of a notification reminding us to update our settings. Email me at lansingallstar@gmail.com
