Sunday, January 28, 2018

DILEMMA

Here is the dilemma:

Must we be either super-informed or depressed? Which way to go?  Or, is there a third option?

If we want to be up-to-the minute on everything going on in our community, across the nation and around the world, there are plenty of sources which can keep us informed. Newspapers and radio, long our traditional means of knowing what is happening, are still here. Television and the Internet, newer and with more impact, are slowly but surely being upstaged by increasingly innovative and invasive media. We can determine in a nanosecond the news from near and far. Everything is here and now. That's one side.

IF we want all of this, what is the downside?

Well, the sorrowful fact is that the content gathered may be terribly destructive to our emotions, outlook and even our sanity. Could it finally be that “no news is good news”? Everywhere there is sorrow – fires, floods on unprecedented scale, violence, corruption, greed, dishonesty, outright lies from the high and mighty, the list of horrific happenings is never ending.

Perhaps there is a third way. Rather than embracing the famed “ostrich solution” by placing our heads in the mental sand of complete unawareness. How about this? Since the disarray and danger is all around us what if we decide to be selective by picking just one?  By concentrating on one we now have a priority. We could then separate it from all the rest of misery for a day or two, maybe more. It doesn't mean we dismiss the other madness altogether, we just put it in a Group Two category while we focus our attention on The Priority.  If you join with another person bewildered by this tidal wave of torturing information (for me it would be my wife) so much the better. We two have selected the horror story of high school shootings here in the USA.

Taking in all the detail on this one subject exclusively can give us a start on a plan for spiritual survival. The second phase is personal action. In this situation it would be inquiring from the community high school as to what are their own procedures for guarding against this sort of tragedy? So too finding out what our police department and medical resources have in the way of safeguards.  All of this, and probably more, can lessen our feeling of helplessness. 

Doing something rather than doing nothing may keep us positive.

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