Maybe We’re Addicted To Bad News
I once heard Paul Scanlon say something like this:
A bad report makes it around the track 10 times before a good report gets around once.
Headlines aren’t made with sweet stories of love and peace and harmony, now are they? Maybe we’re addicted to bad news – so addicted that we can’t recognize what’s good, even when it’s sitting right in front of us.
The other day I stumbled across this headline: Today’s Teens Are Better Than You, And We Can Prove It. The article is online – and it’s interactive. You can select the year you were born, and it will compare your generation to this generation on things like drug use, sex, suicide, and weapons.
The bottom line? Today’s teens are better than you.
It’s shocking, I know.
We’ve been given a script and we bought in—hook, line, and sinker…
Things are bad, really bad. Everything is in decline. We’re headed for doomsday. The apocalypse. Kids these days are spoiled, entitled little brats. They don’t know what it was like back in our day – back in the good ol’ days.
And we need to go back, back to when things were good.
In an interview with GQ magazine, Patton Oswalt had this to say about the good ol’ days:
I think a lot of the problems we’ve been experiencing come from the fact that no one embraces the miracle and amazement of the present. So many people—steampunks, fundamentalists, hippies, neocons, anti-immigration advocates—feel like there was a better time to live in.
They think the present is degraded, faded, and drab. That our world has lost some sort of “spark” or “basic value system” that, if you so much as skim history, you’ll find was never there.
Even during the time of the Greeks, there were masses of people lamenting the passing of some sort of “golden age.” But I’d never go back and live in any other time than teetering on tomorrow; this is the greatest time to be alive.
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I’m with Patton. This is the greatest time to be alive. I’d never go back and live in any other time than teetering on tomorrow.
I recognize that I live in a world addicted to bad news, but I’m praying God gives me the eyes to see what is actually before me: the good, the beautiful, the redemptive… God at work in places and people that nobody expected.
Last night I had the privilege of listening to Bryan Stevenson (author of Just Mercy, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative) at a church in Seattle. One of the things he shared, one of the main points he made, was that we have to protect our hopefulness. Bryan said, “There is power in hope.”
I’ve seen things people say could never happen actually happen. —Bryan Stevenson
When he asked the question, “What threatens your hope?” he followed up by saying, “I’ll tell you what threatens my hope – people talking about the good ol’ days.”
I am a husband, father, pastor, leader & reader. I love God, love people & love life.
Amen!
Yes…”those good old days”. They never were. Looking at a lot of the students I see on a daily basis would give credence to the negativity side of things, but I usually only hear about the ones with ‘issues’, the suspended, expelled. But I also see the ones succeeding at the CC, finishing classes and catching up to graduate with their peers. Bad news hits our “gossip gene’ and the ‘ain’t it awful gene’; both we are warned against in Scripture as sin. The 50′s were the blossoming of great music, but fraught with conformity, racism, commie-hunting. The 60′s gave us the beginnings of the “back to nature” and organic movements, but full of social unrest and violence domestically and abroad–but the civil-rights movement was also able to move forward in spite of it. Then there’s the 30′s and 40′s: the depression, Hitler, world war. Every decade has its good and bad, contributions and detractions (is that a word?). Going forward is our only option, and I personally need to focus on the positive in it all.