“The news media are, for the most part, the bringers of
bad news... and it's not entirely the media's fault: bad news gets higher
ratings and sells more papers than good news.”
--Peter McWilliams
Flesh-Eating Bacteria Kills 10
Seasickness on Stranded Whale-Watch Boat
Faulty Tanning Bed
Sends Three to ER
--top headlines, Boston.com, 7/30/14
It’s been a miserable few weeks for our world, at least
according to all the downbeat, doomsday and depressing news erupting in the
media. War in Israel/Palestine. War in the Ukraine.
Planes shot out of the sky. Immigrant
kids face rage filled protesters who tell those innocent children to just go
back home. That’s just globally. Locally, if Boston.com is to be believed,
flesh eating bacteria is on our shores, whale watching is a potentially vomit
marked disaster, and even tanning beds can hurt you, though we already knew that.
Read the news, hear the news, face the news and it’s almost
impossible not to be pessimistic about our chances as a species and planet, yet
here’s a truth which will never make page one. There
is actually good new about the world but it doesn’t sell newspapers. Doesn’t
drive folks to news websites. Doesn’t fill up the Twitter-sphere with millions
of re-tweets. Bad news is very, very big
business. As the journalistic cliché
proclaims, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
But the good news is…there is good news. Try this. According
to the latest statistics from the United States Department of Justice, violent
crime in our country has been cut in half during the last 20 years, from 747.1
violent crimes per 100,000 inhabitants in 1994 to only 366.1 crimes per 100,000
last year. A fifty percent drop. Where are the banner headlines?
Or how about this news from a 2013 report on global poverty
by the United Nations? "The world is witnessing an epochal 'global
rebalancing' with higher growth in at least 40 poor countries helping lift
hundreds of millions out of poverty and into a new 'global middle class'. Never
in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed
so dramatically and so fast." I
haven’t heard that lead trumpeted on any news broadcasts—have you? Where’s the celebration about this world
changing event?
Warfare: compared to other times in human history, the world
right now is actually the least violent it has ever been. The least warring.
The good old days? One hundred
years ago World War I raged, a conflagration which resulted in the deaths of 37
million people. World War II, just a
generation later, killed 60 million people, 2.5 percent of the world’s population. A conflict today would have to produce
176,150,000 deaths to compare in scope. Wars
are always bad, always, but statistically speaking war is not now what it once
was. Not even close.
Global health is improving too, especially for kids. The number of children under five years old
who die from diseases like malaria, malnutrition, polio and measles has been
halved, halved in the last twenty years, according to the United Nations
Children’s Fund. Or how about human
freedom? A generation ago millions of
citizens lived under autocratic communist rule throughout Eastern Europe in
places like Poland, East Germany, Romania,
and Hungary. Today the Cold War is a footnote in history
and all those folks are now free, in still emerging democracies, not perfect,
but certainly much better than in 1985. How
soon we forget.
Heck, last weekend I was one of 5,500 bicycle riders who
rode the length of Massachusetts
in the Pan Mass Challenge and raised more than $40 million dollars for cancer
care and research. It garnered no
headlines on Boston.com but good news rarely does.
Like stories about folks of faith who faithfully feed the hungry day in
and day out. Kind hearted souls who
shelter the homeless. Good neighbors who
care for one another. That’s not the
stuff of Pulitzer Prizes but we need to hear this news too.
I’m not ready to say these are the best of times. Old problems go away and new ones inevitably
arise: global warming, terrorism, violent religious fundamentalism, government
dysfunction. Yet is our world really as
bad as the media makes it out to be? Or
is instead the news we consume about the world perpetually slanted to the
awful, the sensational, the bloody and the bad, and all for boffo ratings and
plentiful profits?
I choose to be hopeful about the days ahead, in spite of the
daily deluge of bad news, because this is never the whole story. I choose to believe that within humanity
there is always the possibility of renewal, redemption and even peace. My faith
in God inspires this, but so too does faith in my fellow human beings.
So here’s to the good news about our world. It is out there. Find some good news to read
today, or better yet, with your one life, make some good news for others. As Gandhi said, “Be the change you wish to
see in the world.”
Film at 11!
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