Staying Aware: The World Keeps Happening Regardless

*“An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.” – apparently not Thomas Jefferson*

You cannot be a good citizen without maintaining a reasonable level of awareness about what’s happening in your community and the world around it.

It’s part of that famous cost of freedom we keep hearing about.

And the world does keep happening whether you’re paying attention or not. But if you’re not, you’ll just keep getting more and more lost and confused.

So you need to pay attention.

And that takes preparation, and time; the more preparation you can do, with learning the technology and assembling sources to read regularly, the less time it will take every day to stay aware.

But you should still expect to spend an hour or so each day on this stuff, just to keep up with the broad patterns in the world.

Modern tech is great for this, though.

I have mentioned RSS before.

RSS is key; read my previous post on RSS, get a decent RSS app, fill it with a bunch of reliable sources and it will keep itself up to date with everything you need.

Then, when you have a few minutes available you can just pick something from the reader.

You stay informed, don’t get bored and as a bonus never end up addicted to a time-waster game app that keeps trying to suck money out of your phone.

Now you need some sources for community news.

First, find a local newspaper. You may find that yours, like mine, charges such a stupid subscription fee that it’s not really affordable for you and that’s a problem. But at the least you can probably read the headlines for free and, also like mine, just read the whole thing for free if you turn off JavaScript in your web browser.

It’s likely that your local paper won’t have a decent RSS feed, though, and if they do it will probably only be for subscribers. So if you can’t afford that subscription, you may have to look at their homepage every day.

You should also do some web searching for blogs that track your local community. There may not be any, but you might get lucky.

And some sources for national news.

Here are some of the ones in my RSS reader:

These are mostly wildly left wing (for the United States) and committed to factual accuracy but generally flippant and disrespectful and will often include dick jokes.

Perfect.

Then add some sources that focus on specific topics you’re interested in.

Again, here are some from my RSS reader:

These range from weird legal news to tech bubble news to general social commentary. I have a lot more in the reader; this is just a sample.

That really is all there is to it.

In total, I have maybe 30 RSS feeds that my reader follows for me. Any time one of them posts something new, the RSS reader grabs a copy for me to read later.

I read some with the coffee after I get the kids to school, then some more with lunch and work breaks; whenever I might otherwise be bored.

It’s not perfect, but it’s easier than humans ever had it before RSS.