Vacation season can be a balm to the soul. For the past 11 months, I’ve been on a news vacation. It has been restorative, refreshing, encouraging, uplifting – all the things a break should be.
After 44 years in the news business, I was approaching news overload. It was not because of the De Soto Chamber of Commerce happenings, or Arnold Jaycees dispatches, or anything from the Festus-Crystal City Rotary Club or the High Ridge Fire Protection District newsletters.
It didn’t come from any school district, church or civic group in the county.
All of those agencies – and they number in the dozens – seemed capable of communicating their activities in a straightforward way, without the nastiness, rancor and outright hate that seems to accompany news that is made on a state or national level.
As the former editor of this page and its columnist, I was treated to decades of duty as moderator and sometimes provocateur of such opinion. Just reading the letters to the editor, selecting the ones to run, editing them and later (inevitably) defending those decisions often felt like going 10 rounds with a light heavyweight.
Maybe a boxer has a similar reaction after a fight – he might not realize how much it took out of him until it was over.
Negativity, day in and day out, can warp a person’s view of the world. Get exposed to enough of it and you might think the whole world has its fists clenched, ready to rumble at the slightest provocation.
Happily – very happily – I am here to report that most people in the normal, everyday world are pretty decent folks who are not looking to bite a hole in your throat the first nanosecond there is a difference of opinion.
I have been going about my business as a regular human being, not being pilloried constantly as part of the fake news, ultra-liberal, left-wing commie media. In the everyday course of living, people I run into are largely upbeat, pleasant, honest and easy to be around. I can talk with them with virtually no fear of a fistfight breaking out.
Whodathunk?
There is a balance, however, that must be maintained, between anticipating total warfare and sticking one’s head in the news-free sand. We have an obligation to be informed citizens, which means paying attention to the news and doing our best to separate wheat from chaff.
I still read the paper and take in as much news as I can stand on television and radio. My vacation has been from talk shows, cable television – never a big watcher there anyway – and most notably, the comments section of online stories, which are the evil, deranged uncle of letters to the editor.
At least with letters, in publications with any sense of standards, readers know who wrote them. The anonymous, fetid swamp of the internet puts no such requirement on people who come with the vile, the wacked-out, the made-up, the slanderous retching that attempts to pass itself off as public discourse.
Anymore, you can’t even be sure it comes from genuine human people, rather than computer-generated, robotized algorithms programmed to recognize and unleash virtual attack dogs against commentary or news they find objectionable.
That’s where, even on news vacation, you have to employ your actual human brain to discriminate between the real and the unreal. Cutting out comment sections and both talk radio and cable news outlets with obvious bias (MSNBC, Fox News) is a great place to start.
Avoiding that junk and plunging instead into the real world of actual people is not a guarantee of inspiration – we have our share of stinkers and curmudgeons in the flesh, too. But my experience has been that face-to-face, most members of our species are OK. The ones who aren’t, well, maybe they’re a different species.
Removing the negativity of those other places from your life makes the sun shine a little brighter and the birds a little chirpier. It has been a most excellent vacation, and I recommend it highly for those of you who feel the world is becoming a dark netherworld where everyone wants to fight.
Not true, friends.
As Mother Maybelle Carter put it, “Keep on the sunny side of life. It will help us every day, it will brighten all the way, if we’ll keep on the sunny side of life.”
Good advice, even when the Carter Family first crooned it in 1928.
