Lately, there’ve been too many days when I want to escape somewhere to a place where news does not exist. No headlines. No statistics. There is so much horror around us. And our “around” is no longer just our neighborhood. It’s the world.
Some days, I want to pull inward to savor the good I know exists. That’s difficult to do when images of Ukraine and murdered school children invade my thoughts. I feel guilty even writing this. But I wonder, could the twenty-four/seven news cycles exist in a thirty/seventy topical format? Surely at any given time, there are thirty percent of the things happening across the world that are good? These are the things they don’t tell us. I think we need to know about them. Maybe then we won’t be so debilitated and would be motivated to turn prayers into action.
Image: me ruminating some years ago. Although for the prose above, there should not be a smile on my face…..or perhaps I’m thinking about the good?
Written for Prosery Monday at dVerse, the virtual pub for poets around the globe. Today Lisa asks us to include the line “These are the things they don’t tell us” in a piece of prose (not poetry) that is no more than 144 lines in length, sans title. The line is from Girl Du Jour, from Notes on Uvalde.
lillian the home poet 
My same feeling there is nowhere to hide from the horror. I went to my garden, and still couldn’t concentrate.
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It’s why I walk along the Charles River….similar to your garden.
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I have recently stopped watching the news; I can’t get the visuals out of my head.
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Yep. I decided after lunch today that I am no longer calling up CNN on my phone or computer. The newspaper is enough….and I only skim the headlines…never read the details. There is sometimes, sometimes, some interesting local news.
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I’ve stopped watching the news in the evenings – I don’t want that in my head at bedtime. Too much, it’s all too much.
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Lillian I know exactly what you mean. A 30/70 ratio is more than fair. Here is a website I started following a few years back, created by David Byrne (from Talking Heads musical group,) called Reasons to be Cheerful. Check it out and you might be pleasantly surprised: https://davidbyrne.com/explore/reasons-to-be-cheerful
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People become numb after a while. I rarely watch the news. My imagination is enough hearing things on NPR, but I’ve had to turn that off, too, some days.
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I undestand!
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Are there only thirty good and seventy bad? I have always assumed it is the other way around but that the bad are so much more glaringly conspicuous.
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I absolutely BELIEVE you are correct….however, I don’t think the news stations would survive showing 70 good. Did you see the wonderful story about the baby giraffe who was born with something wrong with its legs and the San Diego Safari Park Zoo worked with it and had special braces made for its legs etc and it’s now out romping with the herd? That made me smile. I LOVED that story. But it was probably the only positive “feel good” story on the news that night.
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We need more of that good news as much as we need the truth
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Oh Lil, I hear you, I feel you. I think we should even take it a step further, and have one full hour per night devoted to “good news”, or at least good trouble. CNN everyday heroes type news, but daily. Fireside chats where a moderator puts a positive slant on even the most terrible events. Of course no one would broadcast or stream it, but it is nice to dream.
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Well said Lillian. The 24/7 news stations can certainly look at a different format. We have all become so numb to these atrocities it scares me because I don’t want to be numb, I want action. Sadly I never see it changing in this country.
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There is an online paper/magazine in the UK called https://www.positive.news and it does what you are hoping. There is a free email newsletter you can get which has digests of some of each month’s stories x
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I think we definitely need some good stories to restore our faith in humanity!! Great take, Lillian! 👏👏
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Yes, we need a glad hour. A time for celebrating the love and acts of love happening. I think we should try to find a way to do this. I have my gratitude moment first thing each moment, and I don’t get up until I can list all the things, people, situations, etc that I am grateful for in my life. It’s the best way to start each day.
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“Some days, I want to pull inward to savor the good I know exists.” Lil, that line truly made me pause. I find it so disturbing that it’s come to this. I strongly believe that we had all the tools and resources to be a safe and loving world. We just didn’t figure out how to use them. Instead of the same news stories on repeat and unnecessary presumptions and analysis, it would be nice to include a daily segment on ways to improve humanity….from the simplest gestures to the most profound. Use the airtime to make a difference. Time is running out, I fear.
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A lovely essay about how things could be looked at differently, seen differently, how when you sit and ponder, so many others must too, so many more than the terrible minority who want to harm, to kill, to wage war, and in that is even more tragedy.
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I know what you mean, and it’s very tempting, but imagine if we had a disproportionate number of feel-good stories in the news. How many of us would just heave a sigh of relief and say, it’s not so bad after all, is it? And stop being angry.
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Lillian, I choose to believe you are thinking about the good … I know it exists, though some days it is nearly impossible to feel it.
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It does wear us down. All of it. I pine for me old naïveté. Points well made, Lillian.
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