As you pull up to the stoplight, an approaching car catches your eye in the rearview mirror. Your gaze follows it into the lane next to yours, and the driver meets your eyes and feathers the throttle, signaling a challenge. You reply with a quiet roar of your own, and palms begin to sweat as you grab the steering wheel and shift knob.

Finally, the light glows green and rear tires spin on both vehicles. While all others are left in the cloud of vaporized rubber at the intersection, you trade leads with the challenger until the nose of your vehicle finally edges ahead and is first to reach the finish line – a stoplight.

All the actors in the play, please take a bow. The winner is a news story, fed by the media and fattened with sensationalism, possessing the power to muscle its way to the front pages. The opposition is a contending story with a lot of momentum, but the interest in it falls short. Then, there are the sane drivers still back at the starting line – stories pushed to the back page of the paper and perhaps a minute-long follow-up on the nightly news. Finally, the lead actor: All of America, please take a bow. We are the stoplight.

We are that start and finish line, the track that the media uses to try and grab our attention.

But just as car companies churn out faster cars, new stories are constantly turning up to overtake others and demand our time. Sometimes our society, and thus media, move too quickly for our own good.

Matters deserving of our time and consideration are often replaced with either whatever becomes more “important” or something that is just more sensational.

An example of this can be seen from these past winter months. Colorado and some surrounding areas received enormous quantities of snow.

While many have been put in danger, it is the cattle that present the major crisis. Huge numbers of them are at risk and thousands are already dead. A similar storm in 1997, as related by a Jan. 4 Associated Press article, resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 cattle and a rise in beef prices nationwide for the year.

I have not noticed a single news story about the crisis since the days immediately surrounding the snowfall. It would seem the media’s, and America’s, short attention spans have moved on.

But how does this crisis not deserve the same lasting attention as events such as Hurricane Katrina?

Maybe it’s because the devastation in the wake of that natural disaster was surrounded with much more sensational stories: accusations of the government fumbling its responsibility, rioting and murder, etc.

While there is no doubt that the effects of Katrina will be felt for a long time, the same is true of the cattle crisis.

Also, stories like Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell’s public feud seem to have greater staying power and prominence than world crises like terrorism, war and famine. Once again, sensationalism wins the day.

We are the stoplight society. We control the pace at which the media feeds us our information – at which we accept it. The stoplight can turn green – we see the headline, say “that’s interesting,” and turn the page to something more interesting.

Or we stay red a little longer – take some time to be well-informed, filter out the sensational excess and participate knowledgeably in this world. What color is your stoplight? If it’s green, you probably aren’t even reading this, because your eyes are already darting to the next page.