It’s hardly news that most news is bad news. We’d rather read
about the flaming disasters than the noble deeds. When a fired
38-year-old male nurse pops a pistol at half a dozen of his former
colleagues... when a locally famous museum/pizzeria/funeral home
burns to the ground... when Nation A invades Nation B on behalf of
Nation Q, our torpid minds rapidly rouse themselves out of slumber.
We absorb, we quicken, we feel our hearts thump reassuringly in our
chests. Reading really bad news is the intellectual equivalent of
caffeine.
Why this penchant for daily tales of disaster? Is it a case of
simple human perversity, a genetically-encoded prehistoric zest for
blood and mayhem? It would be fun to think so, but let’s be
honest: bad news tends to affect more of us -- and affect us more
deeply -- than good news. A terrorist attack, or even a sudden 20
percent drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, will devastate us
like a tornado whirling through a trailer park. On the other hand, a
story about a sight-impaired twelve-year-old girl winning her
middle-school spelling bee might cause a mild ripple of gladness,
then quickly fade away.
But now I’m starting to wonder if too much bad news might be
hazardous to our health, mental and otherwise. I wonder if the world’s
woes might be pressing down too heavily on my underdeveloped
shoulders -- or on yours as well. As an example, I’d like to share
with you some of the stories that pummeled my innards this very
morning -- a typical late-spring day in the early post-millennial,
post-9/11 era -- Friday, May 31, A.D. 2002. In fact, I’m still
reading the paper as I write this report, so in effect you can read
along with me.
First let me set the scene: I wandered downstairs to the kitchen
at about 7:15 a.m. after an unexpectedly restful slumber. (Shutting
off the Big Ben chimes in our dining room clock has done wonders for
my insomnia.) I poured myself an orange juice and filled a bowl with
wholesome Puffed Kashi natural grain cereal. I added a handful of
pecans and dried cherries -- a festive, almost decadent touch. The
morning sun beamed strong and clear -- it was already lighting up
the garden outside our window. I heard the songs of cardinals, house
finches and other exuberant fowls. I actually felt hopeful about the
day.
My wife Anne, a chronically early riser, was already at the
kitchen table reading the front-page headline story in the
Philadelphia Inquirer. The locally infamous Center City
Rapist had just pleaded guilty to murdering one woman and attacking
five others. The dead woman’s parents appeared in a photo under
the headline, along with her brother, who had discovered her naked
body lying face-down in her apartment. As I took my seat at the
table, Anne commented on a front-page story about early-blooming
plants as a sign of global warming. Some species, she said, were
flowering 55 days earlier than they did four decades ago. Fifty-five
days? That’s nearly TWO MONTHS! I checked the story myself.
Fifty-five days turned out to be the most extreme case of the 385
species studied, but the news looked ominous enough. The British
father-and-son research team seemed especially alarmed that some
wild plants would go extinct as a result of the climate changes,
while certain cultivated plants would essentially turn into weeds,
spreading aggressively throughout the countryside. I imagined the
fields of England choked with renegade roses and daffodils, a plague
of petunias, rampaging rhododendrons, legions of killer zinnias on
the march.
What else appeared on the front page this morning? A story about
the solemn procession at New York’s Ground Zero, marking the
official end of the World Trade Center cleanup operations. The
aerial photo showed an ambulance towing an empty flag-draped
stretcher past two long rows of uniformed personnel. The empty
stretcher symbolized all the dead whose remains hadn’t been (and
presumably wouldn’t be) found. One woman, the mother of a
35-year-old man who was among the missing, commented that Ground
Zero was her son’s funeral pyre.
Meanwhile, President Bush was exercising all his brain cells to
prevent a major-league war between Pakistan and India over the
disputed province of Kashmir. It turns out that the two nations have
already fought three wars since they won their independence from the
British Empire in 1947. Two of the wars were over Kashmir and
resolved absolutely nothing. That was before the feuding neighbors
had developed nuclear weapons. The next war over Kashmir promises to
be more decisive, and possibly the last of the series.
On Oregon’s Mt. Hood, which my stout-hearted younger brother
scaled just a year ago, a rescue helicopter crashed while attempting
to extricate fallen climbers from a crevasse. It seems that the
climber at the top of the procession had slipped and fallen back
against the climber behind him, causing the entire team to collapse
like dominos and slide down the icy slope into the team behind THEM.
Then those two teams toppled backwards into a third team, and all
went tumbling down a steep incline into the crevasse. Three of the
climbers died; fortunately no lives were lost aboard the rescue
helicopter. One of the climbers watched his 14-year-old son
disappear into the crevasse, then emerge relatively unhurt. It was
an emotional moment, he said. I remember my brother telling me that
during his climb, one of his own party slipped and slid in the same
manner, probably into the same crevasse -- only he didn’t drag
anyone with him and managed to break just an arm or a leg or
possibly both. And the helicopter that rescued him didn’t crash.
In Washington, the FDA announced that it would speed up the
approval of drugs being developed to combat biological, chemical and
nuclear attacks. An agency official admitted that even with the
newly authorized "fast-track" approach, it would still
take companies a year or more to complete just the animal-testing
phase of drug development.
Meanwhile, a Philadelphia police dog named Woodrow died of heat
exhaustion after being inadvertently left inside a patrol car for at
least four hours with the windows rolled up on a sunny day. The
officer in charge of the five-year-old German shepherd was reported
to be "deeply bothered." He had briefly stepped inside
headquarters with the intention of finishing some paperwork, then
left and forgot that Woodrow was still inside the vehicle. Stories
about dead dogs always upset me.
According to an article on page 4, a Vatican-approved Jesuit
journal lambasted the U.S. media for sensationalizing the recent
sex-abuse scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church. It claimed
that the coverage was influenced by "anti-Catholic and
therefore anti-Roman and anti-papist spirit." I didn’t see
any mention of the anti-child behavior of the accused priests.
A young Palestinian woman who had been trained as a suicide
bomber changed her mind, left her bomb behind and slipped away to
her aunt’s house. Good news, right? Keep reading. She wept when
she contemplated what her parents might think of her desertion.
"I don’t know what I’m going to say to them," she
cried. "I can only ask for forgiveness." A Palestinian
sociologist commented that suicide bombers are frequently trying to
gain social acceptance. "Many of them feel powerless in all
other aspects of their life," he said, "but now... they
can change reality, they can prove to their mothers and fathers and
schoolteachers that they are worth something." Such revelations
give me reason to suspect that our war on terrorism could last until
the ultimate collapse of Islamic fundamentalism or the United
States, whichever comes first. Given the size, will and resilience
of both teams, we could be looking at a century-long fight to the
death. I don’t even want to speculate on the outcome, but I have a
queasy feeling that the Muslim fanatics are the rock and we’re the
scissors in this contest.
Bittersweet news from Paris: the widow of journalist Daniel Pearl
gave birth to a son, their first child, nearly four months after the
38-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter was beheaded by
Islamic militants in Pakistan.
In Massachusetts, a homeless couple faced five years of probation
for accidentally igniting a warehouse blaze that killed six
firefighters. The local district attorney commented that "they’re
marginally retarded, so it would be just about impossible to try the
case." The pair, who lived in the warehouse at the time of the
fire, were fighting when they tipped over a candle, then fled the
building without reporting the blaze. The six firefighters lost
their lives searching the burning building for homeless people they
assumed were trapped inside.
Enough misery and misfortune for one day, you say? How much
dreadful news can the Philadelphia Inquirer print in a single
issue, anyway? How much human wretchedness can any of us be expected
to digest at one sitting, especially at breakfast? Don’t put away
the dishes just yet; there's more to eat.
The U.S. military forces in the Philippines (you say you didn’t
know we had forces in the Philippines?) would be pulling out this
summer after a six-month attempt to quash the Abu Sayyaf guerrilla
group, which has been linked to al-Qaeda. The thugs have been
holding an American missionary couple as hostages since kidnapping
them, along with sixteen others, at a resort last year. They already
beheaded the only other American in the group.
A U.S. labor rights group asked the federal government to ban
cocoa imports from the Ivory Coast, based on the revelation that the
local cocoa industry still uses child slaves to harvest the crop.
Some slave brokers have been arrested, but farmers told an
investigator they would still pay brokers to supply them with child
slaves during the busy season. (No report as to whether the child
slaves would see any of that money, but I think we know the answer.)
The U.S. chocolate industry opposed the ban, claiming that the Ivory
Coast was taking steps to remedy the problem. The small West African
country reportedly accounts for 43 percent of the world’s cocoa.
Meanwhile, farther south on the African continent, the president
of Zambia appealed for international aid to stem the threat of
starvation in his country. Up to four million people are endangered,
and the country would be running out of corn, its staple food, by
August. Some Zambians have already resorted to eating wild roots.
The same article noted that about ten million people in four other
southern African republics are also headed for starvation.
You want me to stop? You say no newspaper could possibly contain
such an abundance of woe in a single randomly chosen day? You
suspect I’m making it up, do you? The fact is I’m not even
exaggerating. Here, let me serve you more bad news from the same
issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer, if you can stand it...
Let’s go to the local section of the paper. How much newsworthy
anguish could possibly hit greater Philadelphia from one sunrise to
the next? First I checked the details on that dead police dog story.
"Warm weather and closed vehicles can be a recipe for
tragedy," the article noted. Then I scanned the main headline
("9/11 memorials hold on to part of lives lost") and
accompanying photo: a wistful young mother and her two dreamy-faced
children, a son and a daughter. The mother’s husband and the kids’
father, Michael Horrocks, was co-pilot on one of the planes that
crashed into the World Trade Center last September.
A local judge sentenced three former high school students to
juvenile facilities for beating a fellow student severely enough to
cause him permanent brain damage. The victim was white; the three
malefactors (as well as the judge) were black. "You boys did a
horrible act," the judge admonished them. "I have a fear
that it may have had to do with the color of your skin. Look inside
yourselves and find your humanity." "It’s not
fair," one of the defendants protested as he heard his
sentence.
A prisoner convicted of murdering the wife and eight-year-old son
of his former employer was brain-dead and on life support after
hanging himself from a shower rod in his cell. He had broken into
the family’s apartment wearing a Halloween mask, in an attempt to
claim money he said his former boss owed him. In the ensuing scuffle
he stabbed three people, two of them fatally. He left a suicide note
critical of his poor treatment by the prison officials. "I am
committing suicide to protest," he wrote.
A Philadelphia man was sentenced to a year in prison, plus
probation, community service, and financial restitution, for setting
off an illegal firework that accidentally exploded in the face of a
24-year-old mother, leaving her legally blind and destroying her
senses of taste and smell. She can no longer walk by herself, drive,
or provide for her son. The incident, which also left her
brain-injured, occurred at a child’s birthday party.
"Honestly, I don’t think a year is enough," the woman
said about the sentence.
In nearby New Jersey, one skydiver was killed and another
severely injured in two separate incidents. A local hospital
announced it would discontinue its pre-natal care program for
low-income women. Police were investigating clues in the stabbing
death of a 22-year-old woman who was last seen dancing with friends
at the Adelphia Restaurant. A colonel on the staff of the Army War
College in Carlisle faced charges in the beating and strangling
death of his wife, whose battered body was found in a stream near
their home. The five featured obituaries included Judee M. Roberts,
50, a reading specialist in Chestnut Hill; J. David Kelly Jr., 44,
an accounting director at a local hospital; and Kristine R. Taylor,
34, a former finance director who had been married just three years
ago in Yosemite National Park. The trio succumbed to various
manifestations of cancer.
Too depressing, this local section. How many opportunities the
world gives us to ruin our lives or have them ruined by others! How
many opportunities for grief, pain and perpetual anger! How many
ways to die before our time! And all we saw was the newsworthy
suffering in one American metropolitan area on a single day in May.
Let’s go to the Home & Design supplement. What could
possibly give us cause for grief in a section devoted to glitz and
style? Diana Ross "voluntarily entered" (the article’s
quotation marks, not mine) a drug-and-alcohol rehab facility. Woody
Allen sued his longtime business partner and close friend Jean
Doumanian, claiming that the veteran producer bilked him out of $14
million. All right, let’s get the hell out of here.
How about the sports section: what’s the worst that could
happen -- yet another Phillies loss? Another year of dashed pennant
hopes? How about this: former Philadelphia basketball superstar
Julius Erving filed a lawsuit against a security company he blames
in his son’s death two years ago. The younger Erving drove his car
into a retention pond in a residential neighborhood that was under
construction at the time. Erving claimed that the guards at the
entrance should have prevented his son from entering the restricted
area.
Enough, enough! Time to close this accursed paper! I’ve read
more than I can stand. I haven’t even checked the business section
(for bad news, I simply have to go online and regard my
ever-crumbling stock portfolio). I’m almost afraid to investigate
the "Rentals & Autos" section.
How are we supposed to start the day with this much dreadful
baggage already heaped upon our shoulders? Has the world really
deteriorated into such a doleful melodrama that we can’t open a
newspaper without hearing the moans and cries of humanity? We’re
all like Marley’s ghost, powerless to aid the wretched outcasts in
the street. What can we do when there’s nothing we can do? Some of
us would click off the switch that makes us sensitive to the pain of
the world. Others, more heroic and delusional, would sell their
possessions and devote their lives to helping a few victims. (No
matter that human nature will keep producing them by the millions.)
Or we could stop reading the newspaper and retreat into the soothing
insulation of our own lives -- until we suffer miseries of our own.
Already saturated with bad news to the point of glumness, I
trudged upstairs and turned my computer on. I heard the gentle music
as it booted up, the cheerful clanging of the modem as I went
online. "You’ve got mail!" A friend’s cat just died
after a long illness; I’ve been invited to check out a site
devoted to hot teens with farm animals. On to the pleasures of Arts
& Letters Daily, one of the brave outposts of literacy on the
Web. First story: a family of landowners in Zimbabwe has been
besieged by squatters under the leadership of a notorious militant
chieftain. The intruders claimed the land for the Zimbabwean people,
terrorized the couple, exposed themselves to their daughter, injured
horses on the ranch and threatened the rare, endangered black
rhinoceros herd that the family had been raising painstakingly for
the past fifteen years. The woman of the house wrote four
maddeningly eloquent e-mail accounts of the siege, which was still
in progress. Her husband seemed broken by the ordeal. One could only
imagine the ongoing terror and devastation.
There would be no escaping from the world’s calamities today.
One day, one reader, half a thousand miseries revealed. And the only
action I could take was to write about them. At least my eyes and
hands still work. My brain still functions, though it labors and
sputters. I should be grateful for such good news. I really should.
