Notebook

          Context.
          Without it, our search for meaning is quixotic.
          For example:
          The death of a star 12 million light years from Earth is of inconceivably less importance than a rush hour traffic jam on the interstate.
           While your child's 104 degree fever is of greater concern to you than the four million Syrians who fled the mounting chaos and violence in their homeland.
            Or the drowning death of the three-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdl washed ashore on an empty beach in Turkey.

             Which suggests that on the scale of  human empathy, "there" is dwarfed by "here."
             Anyhow...
             What we're dealing with involves the bone and gristle of the business we call"news".
             As well as what "leads" and what doesn't.
             Oh yes.
             As to why he was fleeing, or to where, or if one child's death mattters among our planet's seven billion souls, or the judges' decision on Dancing with the Stars*...
             *Not counting the vast sweep of stars in our sky.

Note: This is the sort of thing I enjoyed writing years ago in my daily local column in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. But then the paper's new editor replaced me with a guy who wrote for him back in Illinois. But that was a lifetime ago. Hi-Ho!