If watching the news is your ‘jam’ as they say, then your view of humanity is likely to be pretty grim. News by definition is the trainwreck, not about the trains that run on time. It is the 5 traffic accidents that occurred today and not the millions that didn’t. There are over 130,000 schools in the US but you will only hear about them if one has a school shooting. Those who put on plays, won their first football game or had an art display will not become breaking news.
My husband recently treated me to a music festival in a small town in Wisconsin. A small town of ( yes mostly white volunteers) who worked their tails off to bring in talented bands from Chicago and New Orleans as well as Minnesota to entertain and create a weekend’s worth of great music. Their motto was, “Promoting Positive Change Through the Power of Music” and what we witnessed was several thousand people enjoying themselves, dancing, eating, and watching black and white talented musicians playing together. They all came with their guitars, keyboards, drums and harmonicas to Durand, a town of 1824 on the Chippewa River. There were no fights, or even harsh words. Strangers offered to watch our stuff while we danced. Local restaurants closed their doors and offered up their tasty treats in food trucks, while bars offered to have the bands perform there after their sets. “Blues on the Chippewa” with all of its great music and dancing, with people just having fun didn’t make the national news because no one shot up the place.
I was in Madrid for the COP 25 conference several years ago to speak on the role overpopulation plays in our ever-warming planet. The first week I witnessed so many people from all over the world desperate to find solutions to the existential threat of climate change. There were meetings all day with enough reports about rising oceans and expanding desserts to make your head spin, fall off and roll down the hall. Everyone inside was sincere about addressing the price we are paying as fallout from a world gone mad with growth and development all run by fossil fuel. It was impressive, even if ultimately effective, to witness such an effort. It’s true that many companies were there to benefit from the many greenwashing opportunities, but the distraught scientists were there to warn us of a future that would not welcome our presence. Not until protesters showed up during the second week, however, did the media suddenly appear to see what the commotion was all about.
It is certainly important to know about the fires in Maui. But Hawaii itself is not on fire, as so many headlines are reporting. Hawaii is made up of 137 islands and for now at least 136 of them are NOT on fire.
Of course, there are the required amount of feature stories about dogs being rescued and kids having lemonade stands to fight homelessness on the local news, but the everyday good things that are happening are just not news. Those are boring optics in the context of their mission.
I wouldn’t be the first person to say that we are looking at our phones too much. But more importantly we don’t even seem to hold any space sacred anymore where they are not welcome, where silence and relaxing from the world is the priority. I love going to my health club to swim and use its relaxing whirlpool. But now it is quite common to see people even there staring at their phones. Not only are they getting a constant stream of news, but they are no longer socializing, no longer really getting away from it all even for just a few moments.
We have volunteered to surrender to a virtual world. The skewing of our perspective about humanity by our constant consumption of news on our phones and computers is not just bad for our mental health, it’s just not the whole truth. Remember if you are watching something, someone selected that piece of reality for you to see, there was much more going on and often the boring stuff of people just getting along. So get out at witness life in real time, with real people preferably outdoors doing the boring stuff of just trying to live their lives, doing their best to be good people while having some fun along the way.