In Harrison, circa 1962, a curious person who found a hot-dog-sized cardboard tube with red tape and a fuse likely would have called it a giant homemade firecracker, then headed for a pasture, and lit the thing to have a blast.
Yet, as we all sadly realize, the 1960s are a memory. And even the citizens of this Ozarks community of 13,000, including those living near the peaceful residential intersection of Windsor Drive and Tamarind Street, nowadays can't be too vigilant.
So when a 51-year-old Harrison man discovered just such an object lying in the street the other evening, he decided the taped tube was a threat worthy of the Harrison Police Department's attention. So he dutifully drove straight there holding the odd-looking thing out his driver's side window.
Bomb technicians from Bentonville 80 miles away were summoned. They sped through the darkened hills toting their sophisticated bomb-sniffing robot. As you might imagine in the age of cell phones and tweets, chatter of a potential bomb had exploded through the town in a matter of minutes. Quickly, newsfolk and photographers were on the scene.
Meanwhile, a Harrison firefighter abandoned caution and decided to walk the tube across the street from City Hall to an open park. By then, City Hall and the nearby youth center had been evacuated. Adding to the excitement, several blocks of the downtown area were closed.
Who knew what devastating power rested within this possible threat? Well, OK, if one lit the fuse. In my God-fearing hometown, some likely thought this could be a matter of kablooey! Being blown to Kingdom Come. After all, there was that pipe bomb in 2012 discovered near the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, along with a second apparent improvised explosive device later that year which police also confiscated. And a "suspicious" potential explosive device was found in a tree back in April, news accounts say.
The bomb squad arrived to deploy their robot to study the device. Then officers turned their own blast from a water cannon on what I'll refer to as this "potentially hot hot dog," blowing it into pieces they retained for further analysis. (My bet is gunpowder gleaned from kids disassembling several firecrackers).
After three suspense-filled hours, City Hall and the youth center were reopened, along with the blockaded streets. Whew! Life in my peaceful and friendly community had returned to normal by 10 p.m. as lights clicked off across town in the reassurance their cherished police and firemen had been there to protect them.
Vinegar water
Perhaps this boiling point is mine alone, though I doubt it. It's reached that temperature through the relentless barrage of negativity and repetitive political smarm featured continually on national news. Today my life is more peaceful by simply turning off the overkill to deal with my own realities.
The frustration and disgust I'm experiencing toward much of the daily, even hourly, drumbeat of so-called "news" disturbs me more than ever before. It's like trying to swallow vinegar water daily from a fire hose.
Television's 24-hour news cycle has propelled what once were local crimes in this nation of more than 300 million souls into supposedly national events aimed at generating maximum outrage. There's so much uninformed idiocy, partisanship and irrelevance coming at us every day. The noise and petty political agendas have reached the point where accepting it all into our spirits can't help but increase frustration and fuel anger.
Since news directors and others at the top of news operations always decide which information we should receive as news, it could be the drumbeat of featured conflicts and "resistance" is part of a grander scheme to deep-fry our minds and hearts to the point of no longer caring. You, too, may have seen those lab experiments with what happens to rodents in cages who are repeatedly frustrated.
This method sounds like something the late Chicago reprobate and professional agitator Saul Alinsky would have proposed to extremist followers who revel in replacing societal order with hiss beloved chaos. Perhaps that's why he mentioned Lucifer in his destructive little tome, Rules for Radicals.
Maybe the news networks and other major national mainstream news organizations are intentionally creating some bizarre suicidal environment designed to ultimately sink their own ships when most viewers and subscribers finally have enough of the tsunami of negative focus, hype and outright propaganda. But why? And if so, what a grand business plan!
All I know for certain, valued readers, is after decades in this craft (which qualifies me as a hardened veteran who has reported and published his share of what would qualify as negative stories) the focus, pace, content and obvious political agenda of today's news cycles have left even me flat-weary.
It feels as if our once established and noble First Amendment mission to impartially inform in the overall public interest has been supplanted by the goal of pushing political advantage and disunity while fostering widespread anxieties.
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Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist. Email him at [email protected].
Editorial on 09/25/2018