Seems like every time I turn around these days someone is giving me bad news. I'm personally tired of bad news. When I turn on the news, it's bad news. When I answer the phone - more bad news. What happened to the good news? When I was a kid, everything was good news. It snowed - no school - good news!!! I have strep throat - no school - good news! Cartoons are on - it's Saturday - great news! Now it seems like everything is bad news. Your friends only call or email with bad news. My parents are the constant bearers of bad news: 'your grandmother needs open heart surgery', 'remember old Ms. Jones - she died', 'did I tell you about Uncle Bob - it's bad'...... it just goes on and on. I think the older we get, the more we attract bad news. It's like age is a bad news magnet or something. When we are kids the only bad news came in the form of rainy days because that meant we had to stay inside all day. Hell today, that is not even bad news for kids, it just means more time w/ the Xbox or computer surfing!! I would think the only bad news for kids today would be a power outage and the batteries not being charged on their electronics.
When you are a teenager, everything is traumatic but it's not really bad news. As a young adult, there is bad news but there is still so much good news in your life at that age that it far outweighs the bad. At middle age (where I am now), it's about 70/30. I hear far more bad news each day than good. There is still that small smattering of good news like when a friend marries or has a baby, when your kids do something fabulous that makes you proud, when you pay your bills and have money left over - that is really good news. I'm guessing by the time you are my parents age, the ratio changes to more like 90/10. And when you reach my grandmother's age - it's all bad news. Seems like they lose a friend or relative on a weekly basis now. Trips to the doctor are never good news and at that age they watch the news religiously so they must think the world is nothing but BAD NEWS!
Is this an American issue only? Is it a society thing? I think our access to Internet, cell phones, cable channels has opened us up to faster access to bad news. It is instant now rather than delayed. The only time you knew something bad had happened in the old days was when you read it in the paper the next day or saw it on the evening news. By then the news people had time to present the facts and not the skewed instant version we get now. Remember 9/11, how the news people kept reporting all these other things that turned out to be completely untrue. They were excited about giving us more BAD NEWS so they reported things w/o confirmation. We feed on this stuff so it fueled their desire to give us more and more BAD NEWS. The fact that 3 planes had crashed into American buildings was not enough bad news. They wanted us to believe there were more planes on their way and their were car bombs going off in our cities. And we fed into it because we seem to thrive on bad news.
I have been as guilty as the rest....I used to thrive on sensationalized tv programming. I, too, sat mesmerized in front of the tv after Princess Di died, the 9/11 attacks, the Columbine shootings. Now I walk away. I rarely turn on my tv and I never watch the news except to see the traffic or weather report in the morning (even that is bad news: big crash on I35, 'it's going to be a scorching 107 again today for the 15th day in a row folks'). I avoid newspapers and try not to read to much on the Internet. I have enough bad news in my life w/o the help of the media. I don't feel like I'm burying my head in the sand. I just don't think I can believe most of what the media reports anymore so why watch them at all. I'm tired of hearing about Britney and her kids or Brangelina's twins. I don't want to see pictures of their babies. Who cares? How does this effect my life or the lives of my children?
And to think, this whole thing started because today my BFF is having a biopsy done on her neck, my coworker is having a tumor removed from his foot, and my husband's car wouldn't start. Guess that was just more than my middle aged brain wanted to handle for the day! I need a break from bad news! Maybe I'll turn off the tv, computer and phones for one day and see if I can survive. Probably not because then I might miss that one piece of good news heading my way.
1 comment:
I totally agree! I refuse to watch the news as an adult because all I hear of is crime and hatred in area. I don't know if it was any better when we were younger or if we were just naive. It had to have been a much safer and better time as I remember walking a few blocks to the local 7-11 to get a slurpee with my best friend at the early age of 6 or 7, and now we can't let our children play in their own front yard unattended as the crime, gang and child abduction issue has gotten to the point that it inflicts on their safety.
If the world has deteriorated so much in 30+ years then what do we have to offer our children as adults and their children and so on and so on???? It really makes you think about even brining a new life into the world now.
I also agree that as we get older there IS more bad news. We are getting to the age that we have to come to terms with the mortality of not only our grandparents, but now our parents. We have to dealing with the increase of health problems in ourselves as well. I keep thinking if I only lived "healthier" that maybe my overall health would be much better. That might indeed be true, but there seems to be a phase that the world is going through where more people are having health issues.....cancer, diabetes, heart attacks. Is our lifestyle making us sick or are the things that make life convenient slowly killing us???
I sometimes think that if we were back in the 1950's right now how things would be so much better. But who knows.....I am sure they had their own problems too!
We just have to live for today and I guess find our own good news. Heck, go out there and make some happen. My boss at MCM just bought school supplies for a 1st grader at a local elementary school. Not because the hospital had a push and asked people to do so, but because she felt it was the right thing to do. Now if that isn't GOOD news, then I don't know what is. Someone in this world thinking of another and some child that will know for just one day that the world IS still a good place. :)
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