The Sky is not Falling!

My mental health is in fine fettle since I dug out my rose colored glasses and plastered them to my face.  My disposition is cheery and optimistic and every day is filled with high times and sunny skies. The secret to my carefree existence is a simple one; I turned off the news.

Oh, I read the headlines and I am not ignorant of what is going on in the world but knowing about Haiti and donating to the relief effort (which I did) is a lot different than spending hours on end barraged with the horror of it all.  It is a nightmarish thing but my job, as is everyone’s, is to do what I can and then go back to doing my regular job, which in my case is merrymaking.  Sitting six inches from the screen watching the bodies pile up in the street lays you low and is not helpful to anyone – except, of course, the news outlets.  They embrace disasters, and milk every angle starting with the mad dash to be the first on the scene.  Disasters draw audiences to them but even more than that, they let the news people take their normally tedious jobs and turn them into operatic arias.  When there isn’t something earth-shattering going on, and most often there isn’t, news people are doomed to making the most of stories like this:

 Possibly the worst tragedy on record might happen sometime.

It was a rude awakening, but a good one, when I wised up to the fact that the news stories I was following were often as factual as Andersen’s Fairy Tales.  My epiphany came when a story that I had been following for weeks, boo hooing and wringing my hands as each installment declared that what I really, really wanted to happen was never, ever going to happen actually ended just as I had hoped.  I was stung with the realization that I had been keening over a masterful fancy presented by someone whose assignment was to “enhance” a story line to capture an audience.  Something juicy or bloody works best.  Doesn’t have to be true; doesn’t even have to be likely. Just has to get a lot of folks all wrought up and addicted to following every nuance of it for weeks or months or even longer if possible.  News outlets’ business is to create junkies who are as devoted to them as are the cults who stick with the reality shows, show after show and season after season.    

My personal experience at being news still baffles me all these years later.  My house caught on fire.  By the time I got to the house from work some twenty minutes away, the street was jammed with fire trucks, an ambulance, throngs of strangers gaping at the action while they helped themselves to the pomegranates from the tree in my front yard and, the piece de resistance, all three local TV stations.   I guess it was obvious I was the owner of the house as I no sooner parked my car and started running up the street to the house when the cameras were on me.  I slipped in the water in the street and sprained my ankle.  A firefighter was immediately at my side, picked me up and carried me to a neighbor’s yard where the ambulance attendant treated my ankle.  That made the six o’clock and the ten o’clock news. Why?  

Turn off the news.  You’ll have blue skies shinin’ on ya’, nothin’ but blue skies from now on.  Until then…tata