[2021-08-25] My own headlines
A friend recently sent me a thought-provoking and heartwarming tale. Someone who was tired of stories about COVID, looting and brutality and who was convinced that this was the new normal said to an 87-year-old man that 2020 must have been a particularly challenging year. The elderly man—who had lived through polio, diphtheria and Vietnam protests—said no; he learned long ago to not see the world through the lens of daily headlines. Instead, he related that he sees the world through the people around him. "I just choose to write my own headlines," he declared. He offered these examples: "Husband loves wife today." "Family drops everything to come to Grandma's bedside." "Old man makes new friend."
Seeing the world through the media's headlines is ill-advised. This afternoon, I read an interesting opinion piece in The Guardian by columnist George Monbiot about the media's role in various failed wars, particularly the war in Afghanistan. Monbiot asserts:
Any fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the "war on terror" should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable.
Why do the media love bombs and bullets so much and diplomacy so little, Monbiot asks. "News is spectacle," he replies, "and nothing delivers spectacle like war."
As I've seen through my daily perusal of the headlines in my Google news feed, the vast majority of stories are negative and reflective of the worst in our society. Many are grounded in conflict, criticism and polarizing opinions. I'm learning to not click on stories that are likely to contain details that would upset me, and I avoid reports by certain news outlets or columnists that espouse what I see as harmful views.
That's why I loved the story of the elderly man who writes his own headlines.
What would my personal headline be today? "Middle-aged woman works out with son and spends afternoon in bed."
Today, Shane walked me through his noon-time workout. I did a fraction of the exercises he did, but what little I did accomplish left me with an upset stomach. I took a nap to sleep off the self-inflicted nausea.
Notwithstanding my temporary weakness, I still got out this evening for a walk with my sister. I ended the day with more than 18,000 steps, so perhaps my revised headline would be, "With sister's support, cancer survivor keeps putting one foot in front of the other."
