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Scary stories through the years
The longer I live and the more I explore this world and its bloodstream of ideas, the more ways I discover that people are waiting for … and dreading … the big one.
When I was growing up, the first big one was thermonuclear holocaust at the hands of the Russians. I remember lying in bed dreading what the Russians were up to and wondering what I ever did to make them want to incinerate my dog and me. I was just a little kid. Of course, this was at a time in my youth when I believed that the United States of America would truly do no wrong. We were here to save the world. Only foreign countries did bad things, and God pledged allegiance to us.
By the time the Cuban Missile Crisis arrived, a new antagonist had stepped center stage—Satan! One of my very first girlfriends was a Jehovah’s Witness, and she (but mostly her mother) told me all about how we were all awaiting Armageddon, the battle royal between the meanies of hell and the angels of heaven. That would usher in the wonderful new world where you could happily play with rattlesnakes and lions in paradisical friendship.
Everything's coming up roses
As I have written before, so much mass media obsesses on answering the question, “What’s wrong?”
The news is mostly about bad stuff. Dramas, soap operas, documentaries, and even a lot of comedy shows attract people to flock to their screens to hear about the latest conflicts, conspiracies, scandals, rip-offs, and disasters. And this is training for us as we learn by example.
But people who espouse the law of attraction, including a growing cast of non-physical beings, instruct us instead to focus on what’s right with the world. It’s a real paradigm-flipper. It’s almost counter-intuitive because of all the training we’ve had compelling us to look for problems.
Many miracles don't make the news
This is going back to the basics. When you choose to watch the news, do you have any idea what you are implicitly agreeing to watch?
Essentially you are agreeing to watch what a small group of people have decided is in your public interest to watch. They decide what the news is.
Supposedly, the news we watch and read is about real life. It’s puffed up to be the truth, just the facts. We’re supposed to be more informed as a result of our exposure to it. But if you stop to look at what material you’re habitually ingesting in our news reports, how much of it works as important information to know?
It’s often suggested that not watching the news makes one a current affairs dunce. Other thinkers, especially like Wayne Dyer, suggest that passing on the nightly news improves a person’s mental health.
At first it seems like a silly idea to say affirmations to yourself. An affirmation is one of those sayings that you make up to create good stuff in your life.
It could be something like, “I attract a steady stream of good stuff to me in as many ways as there are drops of water in all the oceans in the world.”
Or, “Money comes to me effortlessly.”
And through the law of attraction, it’s supposed to come to you automagically.
To many people, affirmations seems like artificial goodness having little basis in reality. Good, good, good. People with too much good are thought to be Pollyannas and goodie-two-shoes and pie in the sky worshippers and fairy tale believers and hopeless idealists and so on.
But wait a second.
If I were actually in control of my universe, I would merge friendship and business. I would treat my clients as friends. I would work for them as if I wanted to please them, because that’s exactly what I would want from people with whom I do business. I would knock myself out for their happiness because isn’t that what a great friend would do for you? Isn’t that what I would want?
This actually is the model I follow in my personal universe. I can’t really do it any other way because that is who I am. I come from a very service-oriented background. My father was a school superintendent and very much a humanitarian. Most of my jobs have been related to service. I don’t really have the genetics nor experience for ripping people off as a way of life.
As Jolene often says, “I want to make a living, not a killing.”
There used to be a time, and for some people there still is, when it was considered one’s civic duty to watch the news. You watched the news to stay informed so that you could be responsive to the demands of your society. Among other things, watching the news was supposed to make you an informed voter and a whiz-bang conversationalist to boot.
But what’s not included in that picture is that the news is no longer objective reporting from a neutral and reliable source. With the advent of cable TV, broadcast television took on much more of a political or philosophical bias. So these days watching the news means choosing a particular bias with which to frame all the data that’s coming through.
Beyond that is an issue that intrigues me greatly–what is news? What defines news? What is newsworthy? I think people tend to forget that editorial boards decide what to print and broadcast. Someone has to decide that something is news.
This fact becomes far more interesting when you give it some thought about the ramifications. There are a lot of exciting and interesting things happening in this big ol’ world, and yet many of them are not considered news. They are not included in news broadcasts.
