People waste a lot of time.

We watch too much television. We “surf the net.” We get drunk and go home and make whoopee or kill the dreaded “munchies” by eating a whole bag of potato chips. Sour cream and onion, preferably.

But worse than all that, we like to try and make sense of everything.

There are just some things that can’t be explained, regardless of how many times you mull over the facts in your head. Some things are better left unknown.

Where is our social security money going? What is the theory behind drinking and driving? Why does President Clinton make such a stink about cigarette sales yet handguns are sold rather easily to criminals?

These kinds of things bug me. These kinds of things can actually affect my life. Not getting my due sucks. Drunk drivers could kill me. Guns could kill me. To those who say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people,” you might be right. But the gun sure simplifies things for those killers.

I can’t explain why these things inevitablely happen or continue to happen. Why should I burden my brain coming up with answers that basically serve as mental masturbation?

Not everybody has purchased a ticket for my train of thought, however.

Take the Heaven’s Gate incident. People are fascinated by this. Thirty-nine people take their own lives in a mass cult suicide. Six men are castrated prior to the event. The cult leader, Marshall Applewhite, believed that a UFO was coming to take he and his followers away to a new world if they would shed their earthly “containers.”

Applewhite led his followers to believe he was suffering from a terminal illness. This alone prompted some of the followers to lose hope, as one woman said if Applewhite was gone, there was nothing left to live for. CNN Headline News decided that was important enough to use as its lead news report Monday morning.

The bottom line is that he was able to convince 38 people to take a ride with him to another universe. They didn’t mind the steep admission fare, obviously.

So after filling their pockets with a five-spot and a single quarter, filling their bellies with poisonous cocktails and cutting off their air supply, they were on their way.

The question many have asked (and the media has desperately tried to answer) is: Why?

It doesn’t make sense they say. You want the answer? You want it to make sense? Here you go. They were a bunch of lunatics. That’s the most concrete conclusion one can draw.

Some may try to come up with interesting theories behind the reasoning for this suffocation convention. If three members of the cult had untied shoes on (a hypothetical example), there would be three different opinions on the proper symbolism of those unknotted laces. None would be simple, such as the fact that even the best laced shoes can come untied.

The sad truth is there isn’t much to figure out.

First of all, Applewhite isn’t worth the insight. He was a liar, as an autopsy proved when no trace of a terminal illness was found. And with the name David Koresh still faintly audible in the memory banks of Americans, it’s not as if he is all that original.

If you want to wax intellectual on the subject, the only curious aspect of this whole thing is why the Green Bay Packers never brought a lawsuit against the cult for having its logo used as the “G” in the Heaven’s Gate logo. Maybe then they could’ve had the money to keep Andre Rison and Desmond Howard. But I digress.

Second, there are more important things to try and understand. The media should be more concerned about the downsizing of corporate newspaper staffs rather than why some deranged man thinks willingly cutting off his penis is a good idea.

This is the kind of news deserving of a mid-afternoon talk show with whooping crowds and guest panels of tear-stained rejects, not days of coverage on 24-hour news networks. This is the stuff that should be printed in the tabloids. But if you analyze the state of the media today, you might argue it already is in the tabloids.

The way the media eats up this type of news and beats it like Mr. Ed (he is dead, right?) makes me believe that sending my resumes out to a regular newspaper wouldn’t be much different than applying at Weekly World News. It makes me wonder if The Onion might be the best source of news in print today.

You might not believe it now, but in due time you probably won’t even remember that the brother of an actress from “Star Trek” killed himself along with 38 other individuals. And you will never know what led them to believe they were better off dead.

Scratch your head until you bleed. That will make just as much sense.

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Chistopher Clair is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Waukon.