Radio Shangri-La_ What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth - Lisa Napoli [22]
Years later, during the standoff between cult members and federal agents in Waco, Texas, my dissatisfaction reached a new intensity. I was field producing for another network, and after sitting and staring for weeks at the embattled compound from the safety of the media village a mile away, my colleagues and I watched through high-powered telescopes as federal agents stormed in. Flames shot high, engulfing a building that had people—children—inside. We members of the media diligently trained our cameras on the action, shouting to one another about the logistics of “going live.” Reporters in the foreground of the action boasted that their network was “at the scene.”
At the end of the day, when a friendly woman knocked on the door of the news truck to tell me she’d been dispatched so I could take a break, the tears flowed yet again. The presence of a new person jolted me back to the reality of the day. There were humans dying yards away as we frantically broadcast the disaster to the world.
September 11, 2001, did me in. Mercifully, I wasn’t even working at the time. A month earlier I’d lost my maddening job as “Internet correspondent,” which meant reading viewer email aloud on cable TV. I’d been axed in a round of cutbacks after the dot-com bust. As the mayhem of the terrorist attack unfolded several miles south of where I lived, I couldn’t bear the thought of watching it on television. The analysts, the experts, the pundits, the din of the speculative commentary were all being doled out before there was actual information to convey. I didn’t want to follow along with this packaged-for-TV disaster, as each gruesome detail was revealed. All I wanted to do was be silent, meditate and pray. I wasn’t conscious of ever having wanted to do those things much before, but it seemed a more productive course of action than staring zombielike at the television, wallowing in the unfolding chaos with a remote control.
It was then I decided to turn off the news, in every medium, and instead deploy my own Human News Network. For weather reports, I stuck my hand out the window or chatted with neighbors. For hard news, I listened to and asked questions of friends; everyone loved to share opinions about stories they’d read, heard, or seen. If an item piqued my interest, I’d seek out more about it. It was like having my own personal clip service. I studied what I needed in order to write freelance news articles to pay my bills while I looked for full-time employment. There was room now for books, research on topics that interested me, conversations with friends. Downtime to just think. More time to walk and cook and swim. I felt liberated, smarter than ever, genuinely in touch with the world around me. The real world, not the mediated one.
Except, I hadn’t really cut the cord, not entirely. Like someone trapped in a bad marriage, I concocted an ironclad excuse for why I wasn’t getting out. I needed a job to support myself, and what else was there that I could do after twenty years of little else but the news business? And after being out of work for so long, I considered myself very fortunate when I landed the gig in Los Angeles, in the vaunted medium of public radio.
BESIDES BHUTAN’S UNDEVELOPED media culture, my other attraction to the country was its almost institutionalized resistance to conspicuous consumption. That shopping was a pastime for so many people in the United States distressed me. I was hardly an ascetic, or the type who makes compacts not to buy anything but toilet paper and food. I was simply trying not to suffocate under mounds of belongings: trying to live as simple, uncomplicated, and uncluttered a life as possible. There was enough extraneous junk and chaos waiting