Old people generally take a long time to embrace new technologies. It took me five years before I felt comfortable tacking LOL on an e-mail, to say nothing of the more exaggerated ROFL and the anatomically impossible LMAO. Along the way, though, I grew to respect the use of initials in acronyms I had never dreamed of. OMG and WTF save untold megabytes of data, to say nothing of the censors' time and effort. However, after a few sessions with what passes for news these days, I decided it was time to have an acronym of my own. I don't know if it's original - probably it isn't - but it certainly fills the bill for me. The word, if you haven't guessed, is IDGAS. More about it after the little orange thing.
I know it would be a lot more polite to use IDGAD or IDGAH instead of IDGAS because not giving a darn or a hoot is more acceptable among the politically correct, but when I see an article on the front page of what Yahoo laughingly calls news that deals with Kim Zolciak (she of the million dollar wedding) naming her baby "Kash," I feel I need something stronger. Not that I have anything against Ms Zolciak and I wish Kash nothing but the best, but IDGAS! The same goes for a breathless article relating Katie Holmes' date with a mystery man, the most fascinating part of which was that "she looked happy!" So? Fox News followed with an article about five celebrities who each had three nipples. How does this affect my life? IDGAS. I could say the same about ninety percent of what currently appears on the news pages. With a diet like this, no wonder a lot of adults can't find the Pacific Ocean on a map.
O.K., I'm ranting. There's a reason I didn't use WGAS? I realize people do - millions of them. Otherwise, thousands of magazines, web sites and ravening media gurus would be out of luck. There are swarms of people whose lives wouldn't be complete without knowing Paul Ryan's abs are owed in part to an exercise called P90X (for real), that Liam Hensworth said Miley Cyrus' hair looks great (for real) or that "Dancing with the Stars" may be cancelled due to an outbreak of rectal itch (not real). For these people, it's more important to follow some Hollywood scandal than to worry about the real possibility of another war in the Middle East, wherever that is. It's more pressing to know about Paul Ryan's abs than his plans for Medicare and Social Security. This is the future we're talking about!
In fairness, after a hard day at the office, it's often easier to just sit back with a beer and turn on the TV. But there are penalties. One of these days, you'll try to find your country and it won't be there.
It's too easy to find stuff to which we can say IDGAS. What we need is more stuff to GAS about. GAS about our government and where it's going. GAS about the fact that our country is slipping away from us while we're being fed intellectual fast food. Demand something better. Spend more time on Factcheck and Politifact and talk to your friends about it. And if a lot of the crapola websited disappear?
IDGAS.