Shout to the world
Jun. 22nd, 2008 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flyboy_foxThis is the most depressing news article EVER.
And it makes me angry.
We don't need this kind of apathetic pessimism in our daily news. I'm not sure if the last paragraph-or-so was meant to offer a vague and blurry smidge of optimism, but it certainly didn't do a thing to alleviate the soul-crushingness of the article preceding it.
Yes, many bad things are happening right now. Yes, it's sad, it's scary, it's worrying. But the world has ALWAYS been sad and scary and worrying. That's what life in chaos is! We're not an ordered world, no matter how much we might like to think that we are. We're at the mercy of nature, both in the external (weather extremities, floods, land-shifts/earthquakes...) and the internal (sociological nature, human nature, pack mentality, primativity despite our 'evolved' self-given status...).
But... we ALWAYS have been.
Natural disasters, wars, climate changes, fear, pain, injustice... these are NOTHING new. The world has always been a place of turmoil and uncertainty. Where one crisis is resolved or passes, another springs up elsewhere. But we, as humans, as a species and as a culture are strong. We're relative newcomers in the grand scheme of things, but we are fighters. We have come back from the brink before. But we did that by NOT GIVING UP.
The only real difference now is the media. The same media that's wailing about things spinning 'out of control' is fueling that very sense of helplessness with its sensationalist coverage of everything bad it can scrape from the walls of global news coverage. We're made to feel helpless because we're constantly told things are 'worse than ever', when the statistics more often than not only reflect the past few years or decades at a stretch. If something is recorded at a "16-year slump" that means that it was that way 16 years ago, not 'forever' ago. And yes, it's scary to fall backwards after decades of solid progress... but there HAVE been worse times. We move forward. We move on.
And what's more, we can make a difference. We're not helpless! We may not be able to stop disasters from happening, but we can learn from them and we can help ease the road back to normality for those afflicted by them.
I am so sick of the fucking negativity. There is NOT a lack of good news out there. There's just a media obsessed with scare-stories and sensationalism who are determined to paint a portrait of this world as worse than it's ever been because they seem to feel that we intrinsically deserve to live in perfect happiness and harmony where nothing ever goes wrong.
We live on an accidental rock circling a ball of gas. We don't live in an ordered world and we never will. But I believe in humanity; I believe we are survivors. I believe in the power of hope, forward thinking, and most of all in the spirit and determination of life to 'find a way'.
And it makes me angry.
We don't need this kind of apathetic pessimism in our daily news. I'm not sure if the last paragraph-or-so was meant to offer a vague and blurry smidge of optimism, but it certainly didn't do a thing to alleviate the soul-crushingness of the article preceding it.
Yes, many bad things are happening right now. Yes, it's sad, it's scary, it's worrying. But the world has ALWAYS been sad and scary and worrying. That's what life in chaos is! We're not an ordered world, no matter how much we might like to think that we are. We're at the mercy of nature, both in the external (weather extremities, floods, land-shifts/earthquakes...) and the internal (sociological nature, human nature, pack mentality, primativity despite our 'evolved' self-given status...).
But... we ALWAYS have been.
Natural disasters, wars, climate changes, fear, pain, injustice... these are NOTHING new. The world has always been a place of turmoil and uncertainty. Where one crisis is resolved or passes, another springs up elsewhere. But we, as humans, as a species and as a culture are strong. We're relative newcomers in the grand scheme of things, but we are fighters. We have come back from the brink before. But we did that by NOT GIVING UP.
The only real difference now is the media. The same media that's wailing about things spinning 'out of control' is fueling that very sense of helplessness with its sensationalist coverage of everything bad it can scrape from the walls of global news coverage. We're made to feel helpless because we're constantly told things are 'worse than ever', when the statistics more often than not only reflect the past few years or decades at a stretch. If something is recorded at a "16-year slump" that means that it was that way 16 years ago, not 'forever' ago. And yes, it's scary to fall backwards after decades of solid progress... but there HAVE been worse times. We move forward. We move on.
And what's more, we can make a difference. We're not helpless! We may not be able to stop disasters from happening, but we can learn from them and we can help ease the road back to normality for those afflicted by them.
I am so sick of the fucking negativity. There is NOT a lack of good news out there. There's just a media obsessed with scare-stories and sensationalism who are determined to paint a portrait of this world as worse than it's ever been because they seem to feel that we intrinsically deserve to live in perfect happiness and harmony where nothing ever goes wrong.
We live on an accidental rock circling a ball of gas. We don't live in an ordered world and we never will. But I believe in humanity; I believe we are survivors. I believe in the power of hope, forward thinking, and most of all in the spirit and determination of life to 'find a way'.
