Headlines

Headline News! Student stabbed 16 times with a steak knife! Senatorial scandal revealed! Economy makes worst downturn in 68 years! Breakout from prison! Hurricane strikes the southeast of the country: 68 killed!

Sure, maybe it tells you things, but it’s downright depressing.

Do you ever think how nice it would be instead of seeing all that on the front page, we had things like…The first rainfall in 16 years leaves a town in the Sahara Desert celebrating in joy! 2 captured endangered species survive in the wild! After the fire 14 years ago, forest covers 6 acres of the devastated park! A cancer patient recovers from the brink of death!

Maybe it doesn’t draw people in, drive them to know exactly what happened, make them talk in the streets worriedly, but it gives a lighter tone to things, and you know what? It should. We should be just as concerned to hear about the great things that have happened in our world as hearing about the bad things. Reading the newspaper, you’d think that nothing good ever happened in the entire world. Perhaps they think to make us try and find the good things in our own lives and then alert us to the bad things, but a better balance would be nice.

And what’s with the reports on scandal and all that? Sure the general populace enjoys that kind of stuff…just like people in a crowd are idiots compared with people on their own. The general IQ of a crowd is about the average of everyone in it minus about 30 or 40 or more points. People turn into mobs that way. If you’re going to report the darker side of things, at least you could report things that affect people, rather than things that make nosy people opinionated about others.

At least, though, the focus of newspapers ought to be more balanced. Some good things, some bad things, interspersed throughout the paper—both on the front cover instead of the darkest things taking up most of the front page. Perhaps you could divide it into two parts, and have one happy thing and one direr thing per page. Uplifting and educating at the same time. To remind us that all is not hopeless, that good things still happen, but that we need to do things to preserve them as well, that bad things do happen, and that maybe we have a chance of righting them.

If we could only communicate with everyone else in the country and the world, if we could only find a way to show everyone that we’re all on the same side, that we’re not enemies, but friends, the same people, part of the same clan—one earth, children of the same planet that shelters us, no matter what else we might believe in. The concerns of one people are of all people, but the joys of one people are also of all people. And all are equally important. If everyone could realize, there wouldn’t be a need to talk about war or destruction or misery, and we could show all the other things in every issue, everywhere.

That’s not likely to happen anytime soon. But we can always hope, can we not? We can always try and hope and work for it, and then we wouldn’t need to worry which to focus on. <3