Something has gone awry with our priorities.
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We are more heavily invested in some hair-pulling on the football field than in people fighting for their lives in a bushfire or 43 people losing their lives and 70,000 being left homeless by a hurricane (I'm sorry hurrakin we seem to call it now) in the Bahamas.
We see plenty of news about Brexit Boris and Twitter Trump, but really know very little about the substance of the story.
How many of us really know what Brexit is about? How many of us know what Trump is doing for the United States beyond trying to build the Great White Wall and cosy up to some Russians.
They are like cartoon figures to us, symbols of how the rest of the world has got it wrong.
They make us feel better about ourselves. We might have ScoMo, but at least he doesn't look like he misplaced his cat on his head.
I get it. We have world news fatigue. I have it too. You can only care deeply for so long about an earthquake victim before you are overwhelmed by the next tragedy in a remote pocket of the world.
It's a coping mechanism.
But somehow, it seems to be going too far.
We can't look up from our hilarious YouTube video from someone who hasn't kept their mouth shut long enough to learn anything about the world to see what is actually going on in it.
Our attention spans are matching themselves to the time it takes to refresh our Facebook feed or wait to get an extra like on Instagram.
Recently, while my own Facebook feed filled up with frantic updates from friends in fire-threatened Tenterfield in northern NSW, I saw it come up on the TV news.
Concerned faces all around, replaced rapidly by the gleeful singing of A Spoonful of Sugar as the next story about Julie Andrews appeared.
Tenterfield residents, whose allotted minute was up, went back to saving themselves and their homes.
I don't know what the answer is. Maybe it is just being a bit mindful of the fact that after the page has refreshed, the sadness, the tragedy continues.
After we've all felt bad for the farmers and moved on to a story about somebody choosing the wrong coloured bathroom on The Block, the drought goes on.
People and their stories are more than a soundbite, more than an engaging post.
We need to get a little real.
Marie Low is a freelance journalist based in Gunnedah, NSW