craving slow news days

This essay was originally published at The Freedom Chronicles and was written in the months following September 11, 2001, when everyone seemed to be afraid of everything and the news only seemed to be making things much worse. Now in the aftermath of another tragedy involving children - the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementery School -- I pull this essay out to remind us that not all is bad. However, if we watch the news and their non-stop coverage of this tragedy, and let fear permeate every cell in our body, it will damage us all. Let us grieve together if it makes us feel stronger, but not let fear consume us. My deepest condolences for all the families involved in this latest tragedy.

JonBenet Ramsey. The name of a six-year-old beauty pageant winner shouldn't terrify me -- but it does. Like Danielle van Dam, Megan Kanka, Polly Klaas, and Etan Patz, JonBenet has achieved national name recognition in a way that none of us would ever choose for our own children. And JonBenet's brutal murder represents everything we fear as parents.

It seems as if every other month we add another posthumously famous young victim to this elite, ghastly list. Let's face it, we live in terrifying times. Besides kidnappers who steal our sleeping children, there are parish priests that molest our young innocents. Troubled teens armed with acne and assault weapons spray our schools in gunfire. Terrorists take aim at airplanes, day-care facilities, and the workplace. Nannies shake babies to death. Drunk drivers plow into pedestrians. E.coli poisons our hamburger meat and organic vegetables. Anthrax pollutes our mail.

With all that threatens us and our children, it is no wonder that reportedly 19 million Americans suffer from Anxiety Disorders.

In the months following 9/11, I mentioned to a group of mothers that my family was planning a vacation.

"You're flying? I'm afraid to fly," one mother says.

"My husband WILL NOT fly with the kids," another mother chimes in.

"I'm nervous," I admit. But with more than three billion passengers flying worldwide each year -- air travel is statistically and unbelievably safe.

Logically, and intellectually, we all know that air travel is not risky. But we remain haunted by the Twin Towers Attack. Thanks to our media, we relived that assault over, and over, and over again. And we cannot forget the images of airplanes turned into explosives, and monolithic structures crumbling into dust.

Is the news responsible for our collective parental paranoia? Some would argue that the news merely reports the doom-and-gloom, and doesn't fabricate it. But I say, in this media-saturated worlds -- all facts are not treated equally. "Newsworthy items" tend to be those which are sensational or aberrant.

And so, Americans are fed a daily diet of disaster, tragedy, and scandal. As a parent, I simply do not have the stomach for it anymore. I crave slow news days.

I'm not saying I want to be blissfully unaware or uniformed of world events. I'm just asking for a little balance in news coverage. There are approximately 281 million Americans, and I want some acknowledgement that an overwhelming number of us ARE NOT victims or statistics. In fact, millions of American children WERE NOT kidnapped from their beds last night. Thousands of domestic and international flights took off yesterday and landed at their destinations WITHOUT incident. Billions of people eat UNTAINTED meat every year. Millions of Americans (although not the ones featured in the news) are leading very normal, NON-NEWSWORTHY lives.

Why not report these facts? In these especially anxious times, we need to "accentuate the positive, and eliminate the negative". We need to be reminded about the absolute normalcy of life. And we need to stop repeating grim statistics that do nothing but create anxiety and fear in our population.

Yes, we should be outraged and sickened by the despicable and cowardly crimes committed against our children. Of course the kidnappings and murders repulse and terrify us. But we need to put things in perspective and grieve for these isolated, tragic events -- without allowing them to define our culture or cripple us with fear.

While the media seems to take pleasure in reporting the more aberrant nature of society, the fact remains that few of us will ever suffer the horrific fate of the Ramsey family. For the most part, our own days are completely uneventful (in a newsworthy sense) and devoid of sensational tragedy.

Maybe once we understand this, we will be able to sleep soundly at night, take family vacations, send our kids to school, trust our neighbors, and order hamburgers -- without first reaching for Zoloft.

*************** 2001 Lizbeth Finn-Arnold