I stopped watching the news about 7 years ago because it was THAT BAD! So, it's nothing new...

Both, Lots of bad news and increased access. Also, maturity level, as we move from "world revolves around me" to "we are part of something bigger" there is much more to pay attention to.

I haven't trusted the media to report accurately or without bias for years so I watch very, very little. I question every story I see or read because the facts are blatantly skewed and/or missing. They are opinion pieces rather than fact based news.

To the original question, I don't feel things are worse; there has always been "stuff" going on and there always will be. I do believe reporting of events changes, appearing better or worse than they actually are, depending upon the media's agenda at any given time.

Agree with the others who say no, it's not that much worse. Thirty years ago, for instance, you would have read an article in the newspaper or seen a brief clip about the Mexico earthquake on the evening news and thought, "Gee, those poor people." Today you have to angst along with every desperate parent of every student in the school that was destroyed, in real time.

I do not watch the news. It's bad enough reading the papers - I do not need the breathless sensationalism of the talking heads selling me their fear and angst so that they can sell more products.

I stopped watching most tv news a couple of years ago. I don't like how they pick stories and sensationalize everything. I think that many things are not as bad as the news makes them seem. Other things, that are never reported by the news, actually have a higher likelihood of affecting individuals, in general. But, things are actually getting better/more safe for most people, not worse.

For example, the constant reporting on terrorism has a lot of people convinced that they, personally, are at a high level of risk from a terrorist attack. That is NOT the case. But, yet, the news never mentions how many people die each day in traffic accidents. Anyone who gets in a car has a much higher risk of dying or being seriously injured in a traffic accident than they do of being a victim of a terrorist attack. Yet, most of us drive safely, on a daily basis.

The "news" isn't really about anything other than getting ratings/viewers and they do this by picking stories (and reporting on these stories) in such a way as to purposely rile up (scare, upset, or outrage) the most number of people. That's what the "news" is all about.

I do read the headlines, online, and pick stories to read based upon what I think is relevant to me, personally, or to a lot of people, in general. I avoid sensationalism and I also generally avoid opinions. My DH occasionally turns on the PBS news and I'll watch a bit of that, if it's something that I find interesting and relevant.

Overall, I do not think that most things you hear about on the news are as bad as they are made to seem. I think that there are multiple other things, not reported on at all, that are worse than most people know. But, in this country, we're actually pretty safe, despite what the news tries to make us believe.

Lol, when it rains around here and it's just a normal amount of rain, the news will call it a severe storm (and then it's all "STORM WATCH" all the time on tv, until it stops raining). This is not a meteorological definition, just what they've decided to call it to get ratings. Puddles of water are called serious flooding. They show people being "evacuated" in boats, and make it seem like the water is really deep, but the reality is typically that it's less than knee high.

I just lived through a bunch of this sort of thing last winter. Friends, relatives, friends of relatives, etc. were all calling to see if we were okay because the news was making it seem like our whole city was under a bunch of water. The reality was that, out in the rural areas around the city, there are places (fields) that have always accumulated maybe a foot of water (at most) when we get a series of normal storms. There are a few homes out there and the people should have known better than to build there. The roads in these areas always "flood." People who have lived here know, when it rains any decent amount of rain, don't try to drive those roads because they will be flooded/closed. That was pretty much what happened last winter, though it was a bit worse than usual. Oh, there was also a drain that was clogged up and water from the rains accumulated and closed the main road going out of town for a day or two. Watching the news, you would have thought we were all flooded and unable to even be evacuated. Anyone who has lived here long enough to know there is a second road out of town just took the other road if they needed to get to work or something. Someone just asked us again, a couple of weeks ago, how we made it through the flooding this past winter.

For comic relief. :-)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zbjXJM8_qus

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cgm3_jzcNm4

LOL, veggiegardnr. Loved the links.

They reminded me of Dan Rather covering Hurricane Andrew from Ft. Myers, where I went to get away from the storm. As bad as it was on the east coast, by the time it got over there, it was just a pleasant drizzle and we went for a walk in it, but they literally had fans and hoses on Dan at the beach who was staggering around in terrible awful winds where he could hardly stand up.

It was the same for Irma. Even after it was clear that Pinellas county wasn't going to have to worry about much more than storm surge, the local weather folks were all over TV saying things like, "This may look like an ordinary day, but DON"T BE DECEIVED," and staggering around in their rain jackets while interested kids in flip flops and cutoffs meandered past behind them.

It all reminds me of this old cartoon from the New Yorker:

I stay away from TV news as much as possible - it's the worst, IMPO. I prefer NPR - both online & on air - which is way calmer & often more accurate than any of the other choices out there. I check online news headlines as well, but really TV news & so-called conservative news sources will just raise your blood pressure & scare you, which seems to be their goal.

& of course there's all the op-ed & punditry that masquerades as news. It's gotten so a lot of people don't know the difference any more.

But I have to say the world really is in turmoil these days. Looks like Puerto Rico has just been completely destroyed by Hurricane Maria, for instance.

The way things are reported can seriously change how people think about them. I really like this video. This guy could be talking about something like "Chicago is in the grip of a terrible storm, roads are closed, etc." Instead...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PdRWGMyeSYY

I don't think the world is actually in all that much turmoil. I think that the news just makes it seem that way. We've (this country, the world) been through really bad things, like WWII. But, most people who actually went through that have passed. I'm willing to bet the news wouldn't have been able to get away with their exaggerations and sensationalism 50-60 years ago, when so many of our population had gone thorough WWII. I think it's often just a matter of perspective. The more safe we are and the less turmoil we have lived through, the worse any level of turmoil/crime/etc. seems.

Would that opinion be the same if you were in Puerto Rico - or had loved ones there?

writers block, did you see Dan reporting from Hurricane Andrew with fans and hoses yourself? I ask only because I worked at CBS News for two years when Rather was the anchor ('89 &'90) and your observation really surprised me.

I certainly saw him staggering around on TV in a very surprising way, and my mom, who was a local newspaper reporter and was also totally nonplussed by it, asked around among her colleagues who were also out there and was told it was so. I do believe it, Rita.

ETA I had no trouble believing it because, while I do think CBS was the best TV news outlet at the time, even as far back as the Liberty City riots in 1980 much of what the network reported was, well, surprisingly inaccurate on any local story in S FL that I had first-hand knowledge about. And they sure weren't getting their info from their Miami affiliate, which was pretty decent, actually.

It is interesting how our personal perspectives relate to how we feel about current events.

Yes, there are more junky news outlets and information but I try my hardest not to watch it or read it or be influenced by it. And I think I am intelligent enough to figure out which news stories are an accurate report of actual events and which news is garbage filler.

So, perhaps the fact that we had personal drama in our family related to Irma has made me more sensitive to other tragedies and bad news.

Yes, Carol, my opinion would be the same if I lived in Puerto Rico, or had loved ones there. My opinion would be the same even if I knew/loved one of the ~20-40+ (?) people who has lost their lives there or who was missing. I didn't say that it wasn't bad in Puerto Rico. I didn't say that people there weren't affected or that there wasn't a lot of damage. I said that the world, taken as a whole, isn't really in all that much turmoil, especially as compared to what we've been through in the past.

"Puerto Rico has been completely destroyed..." I'm not sure how to write this, but I assure you that I do not mean this in any way that's unsympathetic towards Puerto Rico and the people there. I'm just trying to talk about perspective. What's your definition of complete destruction? I think that you, the news media and I might have different definitions of complete and total destruction. I think my definition of complete and total destruction is probably much worse than yours.

I do agree that what we've been through, individually, is one factor that influences how we think about things. Actually, that's exactly what I was trying to say.

I've noticed the same as veggiegardnr; EVERYTHING seems to be catastrophized these days. I do recognize that there are terrible catastrophes in the world right now, but I think if we looked back at the news, there are catastrophes each year, all around the world. Maybe because these are closer to home and we are more aware and affected by them, it seems like there are more. I do believe climate change will continue to increase the severity of some of these events, however.

The only social media I do is NextDoor and the Emergency Management agency for our county is on it, too. I appreciate knowing if there is an emergency, but I don't need an emergency alert that it's going to be below freezing tonight and there might be ice on the road....or that 40 mph winds are forecast, when anyone who's seen the news would know that...and just what are we supposed to do about that "emergency"? It happens EVERY winter. If you don't have food and water and fuel set aside every winter for a few days without electricity, then I say you are a fool. It's not an emergency, don't send out an alert. You're crying wolf.

Last winter's Stormpocalypse in Seattle that never appeared was a good example. It was so dramatic, the build up - and I don't even HAVE TV news!

With apologies to the people in Texas and Florida who suffered real damage...this was the result of our historic storm:

Writersblock, good to know. As far as the decline in quality at the Tiffany Network, nobody I worked with failed to tell me what a completely different animal CBS News was in the 80s vs. the past. The Dallas Bureau had photographers who had been with the network since the 50s at the time. Scott Pelley and James Hattori were the correspondents. Mary Mappes and Clem Taylor were the producers. I was an intern. I was encouraged to finish law school and never look back by everyone from the talent to the technical staff. They saw the handwriting on the wall long before the internet.

Am I being sensitive or are we living in a particularly tumultuous time?

I believe 3 major hurricanes within a few weeks of one another - 2 of them Cat 5 - is tumultuous, even without the earthquake in Mexico and the fires in the West.

A great pity, Rita, but wise advice, alas. Similar things were happening with newspapers, too, for all that they love to blame the internet for their failure. I would happily pay a large sum for a reliable in-depth news source if I could find one, but people don't even believe in the possibility of such a thing anymore.

I think that many viewers don't know there is a difference between Opinion personalities and News reporters. Sure, the major network news programs are biased but on the whole reports from NBC Nightly News and the CBS and ABC national nightly news are reporting what has happened that day.

I can not imagine not knowing what is happening in the world.

Having friends that have lost their homes in The Keys, I am glad that they were paying attention to the news coverage and were able to get to safety before Irma hit.

What's different now is there are very much more people on the planet than at any time in the past. An absolutely enormous amount of people are alive today, just in China by itself. And the global climate is becoming disrupted as a result - there ARE more serious catastrophes happening now than in the past lives of people that have been around for awhile.

Whenever it is going to rain hard in Houston one sees the same old tired photos with the same car up to its roof in water. I think that like everyone else the media has saved pictures and snippets and I think in their down time they file them, and pull their favorite appropriately horrifying ones whenever there are, for instance, weather issues.

So instead of investigative journalism I think that sometimes, for some media, it's like they drop a dime in the (computer) jukebox and punch in their favorite song.

"TERRIBLE.... HORRIBLE... GRAPHIC!!!!" things have been happening for MILLENIA now. I think the world was supposed "to have ENDED" about 927 times. It's supposed to end, YET AGAIN in a few days.....isnt it?!?! ;-))

The internet now reaches almost everyone alive, in the palm of their hand....for better.....OR worse. Do you think that N Korean wacko would be doing HALF of what he does, if he didn't get the INSTANT feedback/publicity of his actions? Unless something DECISIVE happens, that little dog will keep barking.....

YES, the myriad of "bad things" that happen every day can be heart-wrenching. BUT.....there are thosands of GOOD things happening constantly too!!

BALANCE people.....balance.

Faron

Sep 23 to be exact. have a friend that is extremely preoccupied w/end of world and salvation prepping. Every time an EOW date comes and goes, it takes super-human effort not to ask her why prophecy did not come to pass. What stops me? I'm too relieved we missed Armageddon so I skip the pettiness, ha.

I believe 3 major hurricanes within a few weeks of one another - 2 of
them Cat 5 - is tumultuous, even without the earthquake in Mexico and
the fires in the West.

Make that 2 earthquakes in Mexico.

There's also many years where Hurricanes DON'T start. These FAR outweigh the busier years.

Major quakes are pretty infrequent overall too. I'm not making light of anything here! Just pointing out basic facts.

It's FAR easier to succumb to "hype" than it is to keep a level, scientific view of events......

Hurricanes, Quakes, Fires, etc.....have ALWAYS happened. They will CONTINUE to happen. Natural events could give a rats-a$$ how people interpret them. It's OBVIOUSLY just part of a normal/dynamic planet.

Faron

Yes, they've always happened, but their dynamic is changing. I know you're a denier ... just pointing out basic facts.

How does climate change figure into the picture?

It’s complicated, but there’s reason to think that a changing climate will have at least some impact on hurricane season activity. (Discover how climate change likely strengthened Hurricane Harvey.)

"When it comes to next year’s hurricane activity seasonal prediction,
anthropogenic impacts are not a primary concern, as the change due to
anthropogenic effects from this year to next year is obviously small,"
says Hart. "However, in the decades and century to come, it could easily
become the primary concern for driving hurricane activity."

The sweeping U.S. Climate Science Special Report,
prepared ahead of the U.S. government’s 2018 National Climate
Assessment, says that detecting climate change’s fingerprints on
hurricane behavior is challenging. Because hurricanes are rare events,
there aren’t many data points for scientists to examine for a trend.

That said, in coming decades, predictions based on warming suggest
that average-intensity tropical cyclones—Atlantic hurricanes
included—will likely get more intense. Emanuel adds that there’s “pretty
good consensus” that high-intensity (Category 3, 4, or 5) hurricanes will also become more common in coming decades.

It's unclear whether the total number of hurricanes will increase or
decrease. More than 70 percent of tropical cyclones worldwide are
Category 1 or 2 storms, and these weaker storms may or may not become
less common in future decades.

Emanuel and the report both say that on average, individual
hurricanes will drop more precipitation in the future, since warmer air
can hold more water vapor. We are likely beginning to see this act out
today: Every scientist contacted by National Geographic for a previous story agreed that Hurricane Harvey’s record-breaking rain was almost certainly shaped by rising temperatures from human activity.

Future storm surges may also worsen, says Emanuel—partly because the
intense hurricanes that cause them will be more numerous, and partly
because of sea level rise."

Article was published before Maria devastated Puerto Rico.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/hurricane-irma-harvey-season-climate-change-weather/

There have been better times and worse times throughout history as far as I've ever learned. And climate change as well - remember the ice age, dinosaurs and such. We shot and killed people regularly when America was being settled including annihilating the American Indians, had slavery, drought, dustbowl, the depression, holocaust, people died young due to all kinds of disease and illness, etc.

I don't think things are "worse" they are just bad in different ways. Plus we now continuously hear all the gory details carefully sensationalized for audience appeal and ratings. Not to mention the onslaught of social media opinions. And relatively speaking at least some number of people live easier, more comfortable lives than their ancestors. They have not lived a life of poverty, moved to a new country whose language they didn't speak or lived through a world war or a depression so perhaps it seems "worse" to those who have lived a relatively "comfortable" life.

I remember in the 70's when MANY scientists were convinced climate data showed a new ice-age would be coming (I don't remember the predicted time-frames tho'). Well....that's not quite what ended up happening, is it..... ;-)

If you take a Loooong-run look at the natural world, there are quite a few cycles. But wait!!!!! The internet wasn't around to dramatize anything!!!!!

:-)

Faron

Anthropogenic Climate Change is something new. What is happening now is not present in what is looked at in order to read the past.

This is not a secret.

We may have more hurricanes in the future than we have had in the past. We may be having more now than previously, but, that doesn't make us less safe, on average, now than we were in the past. Plus, when there is a hurricane, help gets sent fairly promptly vs how things were in the past. We may have to make adjustments to where we live or how we build. It's not good, but I do think we will be able to make adjustments to keep people safe. I totally get feeling personally less safe if you live where there are hurricanes (I'd probably move, if I lived where there are hurricanes, if I could), but most people in the US don't live where they are affected by hurricanes. We have earthquakes here, but that's another story.

It is worthwhile to consider the past, I think, and all the terrible things that have happened in the past and really think about all the things that the world has been through...the epidemics/pandemics (influenza, plague, polio, etc.), starvation when crops failed, horrible wars, infectious diseases without vaccines to prevent any of them, life/death before antibiotics when a cut could kill you, life before modern medicine, life back when doctors thought they didn't need to wash their hands and did barbaric surgeries on awake patients and women had a good chance of dying in childbirth, when days where children commonly died, the days when we had no fire departments to put out fires, etc. Do you remember the cold war? Vietnam? What about WWII? It was the most deadly war we've ever had. Somewhere between 60-80 million people died (many in horrible ways) as a result of this war, including 6 million Jewish people in the holocaust. I could go on for paragraphs.

If you stop and consider what the past was really like, do you still think that we, in general, are less safe at this moment than in the past or that the world is in more turmoil now than it has been in the past? Do you really feel that you are personally less safe than people who lived before you or less safe than you have been previously, in your own lifetime? I mean...with all the airbags, helmets, video cameras, help available when there is a disaster, MRI machines, endoscopic surgeries, cell phones so you don't even have to walk to a payphone when you get a flat tire, etc? The world, as a whole...if you stop and think about history, do you actually think there's more turmoil, more danger, more disasters/calamities now than in the past? Or, do you think maybe it's all the access and the news media sensationalizing stories and generating fear so that we'll tune in more often and for longer?

When would you rather live, if you could choose WHEN? Now, or in the past?

I don't think things are much worse now than in times past. However, as others have noted, everything is sensationalized: breaking news! And everything comes at us from multiple sources. People are addicted to their phones or computers, waiting for the next hit. The news media keep us in constant suspense as a way to manipulate our reactions.

I stopped watching TV news after the last election cycle. It was just too much. I look at news headlines on my ipad every so often, and I spend quality quiet time reading the Sunday newspaper. I also maintain a healthy distrust of any one news source, whether liberal or conservative. That's it. I do feel far less stress by cutting down.

This resonates w/ me:

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. "

Arthur Schopenhauer

I purposely have not yet read others' comments. But this is so timely for me.

Just yesterday I was saying to my DH "I don't think it would impact my own life one bit if I never read or listened to the news again." By the same token, when we went away for my birthday recently, in addition to all the special and lovely things we did to celebrate, the cap to my day was being able to watch TRMS in the tub.

I am conflicted you see.

I agree the world seems suddenly terrible. Terribleness seems to be springing up all over. It seems like too much to take. The piece de resistance for me is the threat of nuclear war (oh, that). Not since I was a kid did I fear such a thing. For years I have been assuaged by the logic of MAD as deterrent, with only fleeting anxiety about the idea of lone wolf doing something irrational. Now my president is speaking so casually and recklessly, that he has reawakened a fear I felt we had moved past. It is hard to top the significance of that. I never thought the "lone wolf" irrational person with access to nukes might be a US president.

Another anecdote. I was on my way to a routine Dr.s appointment. On the way there, DH and I were discussing current events, I don't recall specifically what. I think tax policy. I got so worked up and angry just discussing it (and my DH and I agree!). Anyway, I have never had high blood pressure. I am reliably like 110/70-something. Don't you know it was 136/86? That is really shocking, a physical manifestation of the impact of these things.

The last anecdote I will relate is about "white privilege". TBH I did not know a lot about the concept (I still don't), but my impression a priori was that it was a bit of overkill. Like blaming me for acts of people I never even knew from another era. Anyway, then I read something. The gist was, part of white privilege is deciding whether you feel like standing up for people who are persecuted,or not. But if you or a loved one is part the group being persecuted, you don't get to decide that. That resonated with me. Don't turn my head because I can. Don't turn my head because, in all likelihood, my life sails along fine no matter what policies are in place or what social norms we accept.

I don't have answers, but I sure can identify.

PS I have now read the other replies, and find it interesting that 2 of the 6 things you listed were natural disasters, but most of the comments were about natural disasters. I know it is facile to blame them on global warming but, well it does make one wonder. And do we wait until all the data is in to prove such things, or take precautions anyway? As for 2 earthquakes in a row, my goodness, i've got nothin'.

Perhaps the most rapidly increasing result of global warming is fire incidence. In addition to coastal flooding. Worsening of hurricanes is just one aspect of it, that is already manifesting. Then there is the possibility of changes in ocean currents bringing on an ice age. People all across North America will certainly notice that, whether or not they are following the news, in denial etc.

Because it is now thought that how it starts is one day it starts snowing. And keeps snowing.

Off & on for a couple years, I've been geeking-out by reading various solar & climate-debate reports.

My main point is.... for HUNDREDS of years, warm periods & colder periods have wreaked havoc in human activity. Even during the "Maunder Minimum" period, there were significant climate variations on our planet.

Now....500 years later.... we're experiencing.......THE SAME DAMN THINGS/variables that happened then. Some areas were very warm. Others.....cooler for many years.

So.........when some outlets portend the "global-warming", "sky is falling" BS, I'm rolling my eyes. Pull your eyes ba-aaaaaaack from the timeline. Cast a looooonger glance!!!

>>>>>> This has happened before. With or without humans. HUGE variations HAVE happened.

Pollution?! Yes. Obviously man-made. It affects air in unhealthy ways. This IS unique to the last 100+ years.

BUT.......is human activity solely responsible for weather/storm changes over our incredibly brief period in Earth's timeline?

Hardly.

Faron

I'll stop my climate babbling now!

To the OP's news "glut" we deal with.....yes.....we have to shut most of it out, IMO. Bad things happen to all of us. I nearly died when I was 10 (spinal meningitis). Lost my Dad at 14.

To really LIVE life.....you can't let it run you off the road. Me....you....ALL OF US here......need to stay on the road. There's not much point in living if you LET (yes, there's a choice here....) everything try to drown you!

Whether we know about a bad event somewhere or not........ DOESN'T CHANGE A DAMN THING. I DON'T mean ignoring everything.

>>>>> Just don't let it overwhelm you.

Faron

Climate change is of course happening according to the extreme vast majority of atmospheric scientists, who are very rational people who love computers, physics, models and mathematics. Is it having an effect on Atlantic hurricanes? Hurricane activity is so variable that it's really hard to tell. I saw one statement by the NOAA that it will take about a century to see between 2% and 11% increase in intensity of hurricanes on average. If we tended toward the top estimate we will almost certainly increase the frequency of really huge outlier hurricanes that cause enormous damage.

I think for most of the world life is gradually getting better. Hunger and malaria are way down in the past decade and continuing to go down which is amazing*.

In the US in particular, I believe that your quality-of-life is stagnant or declining for most Americans. Income inequality is increasing and your life expectancy has topped off or is declining. It appears to me from the outside that some cherished democratic institutions are weakening and that people accept a large degree of "not playing fair" in politics in order to win (gerrymandering and voter suppression being two examples), although dirty pool isn't anything new in politics.

For racism related incidents and police shootings, I don't think these are necessarily getting worse, but I think white people are being forced to pay attention to them and we are feeling a bit of the bad feelings that the black community (and in Canada indigenous people) have had to deal with for quite some time. So we are taking on a little bit of the burden they've been feeling. That's a good thing, but it feels bad.

Certainly I believe in some ways we are seeing the decline of a world power as other world powers rise to the forefront. As a relatively inconsequential northern neighbour Canadians are certainly feeling the heat, if your society fell into much more disarray it would be very uncomfortable for us.

I think the idea of a global village in general is very positive, tragedies elsewhere in the world do affect us more emotionally than they did in the 80s and that's because we are starting to see people around the world as just that, people, whose suffering means as much as our suffering. That said there are a lot of people in the world and a lot of suffering, I don't know how you can pay attention to it all. My strategy is to donate to both local and international charities and kind of ignore the news as best I can.

Hunger: https://ourworldindata.org/hunger-and-undernourishment/

Malaria: https://ourworldindata.org/malaria/

NOAA on hurricane activity: https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/

Life expectancy: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db267.htm

Income inequality: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2015/demo/real-household-income-at-selected-percentiles--1967-to-2014.html

Also not to get too political but that UN speech did fill me with quite a bit of existential dread. Ugh...I might have to start collecting Christmas Village pieces again as an anxiety displacement exercise. They're already taking up two shelves in my basement! I'm running out of room! When your satirical paper hits a little too close to home...

Isn't it ironic. The "news" people think this is all about our RIGHT to know. On the up side many many people are inspired and motivated to help. Either money or physical labor...it amazes me. We are all in this together in the end. I could love with out all the PC pushing agenda crap. That is not news that is shoving their agendas down our throats making it seem like a majority, like they are RIGHT when it is just one opinion among MANY.

Hurricanes and earthquakes are not opinions.

I agree bias is a problem on both sides. It is actually quite difficult to be unbiased though, truly. And then there are arguments that there is some sortof responsibility on the part of pundits to make judgments and share them. I can understand that, too.

Robo, too funny.

I disagree (with that). I am pretty liberal on most issues, certainly lifestyle issues.

Regardless, bias is a problem indeed. And the media has a liberal bent that I can imagine might make those who disagree feel excluded.

Wow, thread drift!

I think there are ups and downs of bad news. We're not in the best of times, that's for sure, but also times have been worse in my lifetime. There were many awful riots in the 60's and many boys dying in a terribly depressing war and we had several major political figures getting shot. On the flip side, at the turn of the last century, my greatgrandfather died from cholera from bad well water on his farm, leaving several young children and a wife who really struggled to regroup. My grandfather's two sisters died in the post WW1 flu epidemic. That kind of thing was pretty common back then, personal tragedies like that.

But I will say this, we are at a time when public discourse is particularly nasty and negative, and I think the younger generation is seriously lacking in some basic manners and the concept of social niceties. We may have been overly formal in the past, but I think the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction. My grandmother taught me how to get along with all kinds of people. In her day, you basically lived and got most of the stuff you needed from your hometown and you were stuck there so best not to make too many enemies and to know lots of people and have favorable relationships with them. We're too cavalier about the importance of the social fabric nowdays, I think. While there have always been rude, bullying obnoxious people, they are starting to become way too common, rather than the exception. I see a general coarsening of our society from when I was a kid. And it is celebrated on TV. Old-school concerns about violence on TV from the 60's and 70's and its effects on young minds seem almost quaint considering what a garbage dump TV has become. And many of those soft porn violent shows are the critics darlings.

Things not lookin' so good this weekend.

1. Engaging North Korea

2. Puerto Rico humanitarian crisis

3. Calling out sports players by name while #1 and #2 going on.

4. ETA to add kicking 20-30 million people off their health insurance this week still a possibility (though looking less likely)

Ha! gsciencechick - don't forget about the released list of 21 (!) states whose election officials were finally contacted by our federal gov't to let them know they were targeted by Russia during the election...

I have had to step away from politics and news too. It is hard to believe that both poverty and violent crimes have been less for years now in America than in previous decades. But from news that does not portray. The middle class shrank yes, but upper grew and poverty lessened. Income had stagnated and disparity, a huge problem has grown, but the economy and salaries started to grow under Obama and are still continuing to crawl ahead.

Air pollution is down but water pollution is up. Global warming exists but there is still dispute on how to remedy it and what actually causes most damage...the detergent the EPA insisted be added to gas to help clean the air in the eighties, MTBE, is actually what In turn caused horrible water contamination and the EPA phased it out in the early 2000s.

My country has a too high percentage of uninsured people but many countries have an equal number of covered people who can not obtain doctors or services. We have mammograms too often and too early while my English sister had her first at 49 and will not get another for years...and my DH's cancer would have gone undetected until at least 75 or it caused symptoms, which is way too late, if he was still under national health care... American's pay too much for phama but our prices might allow for development, cures and charity that benefits the rest of the world. As a rich nation I feel that is an important price we should continue to pay. If our prices go down the rest of the world's could go up and/or cures will stall.

the news and we, as people, never focus on all sides of an issue we decide what we feel is best and do not acknowledge that both sides have correct and incorrect ideals. All systems have flaws and all systems can have positives simultaneously.

We blame natural disasters on possible human causes to give a false sense of control, I believe. "If we caused it we than could eliminate it as well." But that is a very false sense of safety.

Several years ago, I had an hour's commute to work every day and listened to NPR a lot as a result. They had a guy on there pitching his book about why the nation and politics had become so divisive. This is somewhat related to the negativity concern. It is a well known factor in both predicting and managing human behavior, that humans are hard wired to react to immediate dangers. It's a lot more difficult to motivate us, or even get our attention on complicated, proactive things. Acute danger and negativity enlists our most basic motivational forces to act, and this is well known and used by the marketing and advertisement forces all throughout our society. The fact that there is a need for raising more and more money in politics means that there will be more and more negativity in media. We get it because it works, because it sells. We get it on TV because it gets ratings, i.e., it sells. Cute puppies sell too, as does sex. Basic human survival, danger, intrigue, sex, protect young, eat drink and be merry. So that's what we get. But unlike all other animals, we are sapient, we are wise enough to know what is going on and we have a lot of ability to understand the world beyond just those basic things. The only difference I see is media is increasingly intrusive and brings quite an air of concern about distant realities to our lives. People are spending an awful lot of time in virtual worlds now.

It's odd to me how people can be so upset and concerned about the acute damage that these hurricanes are doing (not that there's anything wrong with that) and yet the same people could care less about implementing/paying for long term projects that would prevent future hurricanes from taking such a devastating toll. Not that we can prevent hurricanes, but there are ways to mitigate their damage. But it's something far off that may or may not happen in their lifetime so human nature is to gamble with the odds on something that is not acute. And yet when something acute does happen, then we spring into action. Same with health care, we seem to care about some poor cute kid's life, but not about making health care available to all, particularly on the preventative level. It's frustrating to me, and yet I know that it is just human nature. The cute kid with cancer trumps the boring policy discussion on how to provide more health care for poor people in this country. The cute polar bear cub vs jobs to feed your family ends up being the sum total of a very complex issue of how to deal with climate change. And Kim Jong Un and DT are tailor made for each other's publicity machines and power gaining strategy, so that's what we get. If we didn't feel like our very lives were at stake, we might be entertained by them on the wrestling channel.

Freud even went so far as to think self-destructive behavior in humans was somehow instinctual, seeing as how we were often so seemingly illogically attracted to negative energies.

I propose an experiment, for anyone interested in experimenting. :-) Try turning all of the news off for a couple of weeks. Turn off the network news, don't read the papers and turn off the radio when they start doing news. Avoid discussions about politics. Don't look at Facebook, either! :-) If anything REALLY bad happens, you'll hear about it from a friend or neighbor or some sort of alert, etc.

Don't really see that happening since I am married to political science major, but last weekend when the family was here visiting it was nice to have a little break from not only news but everything online. And no one even talked about T, which was really, really nice.

Of course, I am paying for that break this weekend with all the work I am making up.