Don't nobody bring me no bad news
'Cause I wake up already negative
And I've wired up my fuse
So don't nobody bring me no bad news
I'm beginning to want to blurt out the title of that song that Evillene, the wicked witch in the Broadway musical The Wiz, sang: "Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News!"
The recent content of the local, national and international news -- deadly tornadoes in Arkansas; more deadly tornadoes along with torrential rains, flooding and wildfires in other states; and the violent crime, the plagues, the untimely deaths and other news that bring to mind Bible prophecy and disaster movies -- is enough to shake the most hardcore Pollyannas.
Matter of fact, my aversion to too much bad news is what made me decide years ago that although I wanted to write for the newspaper, I didn't want to write "hard news." Lack of guts to have to report on the bad stuff? Not confrontational enough? Wellllll, I might cop to these. (God bless my co-workers over on news side; they're very good at doing their jobs.)
But I also had a genuine desire to report on the good things going on in the world, and I figured that writing features was the perfect way to do that. Not that we Features folks don't deal with healthy doses of negativity. But it's nothing compared to the walls I might be climbing after dealing with tragedy and scandal on a steady basis.
My pastor advises his flock not to watch TV news at night before bed. Too many negative things going on that can get down in one's spirit. Right about now, I see his point.
Interestingly, a news organization, The Guardian, carried an April 13 online piece that backs my pastor, stating that bad news was bad for one's health. The piece is an edited excerpt from the essay "The Art of Thinking Clearly: Better Thinking, Better Decisions" by Rolf Dobelli. One of Dobelli's contentions: Because news reports concentrate on the "dramatic" aspects of such occurrences, we think the risks of making choices that could lead to similar fates are bigger risks than they actually are. "News leads us to walk around with the completely wrong risk map in our heads," he wrote. "Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability."
Bad news, Dobelli continued, is also "toxic to your body. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol).
Style on 05/11/2014