Crucial Minutiae

HAPPY HAPPY

I’ll be honest. Sometimes, I feel like a fool, writing this column week after week. I stubbornly search for some small piece of beauty hidden in the dire daily news parade of Bad, Worse, and Worst. All because I refuse to learn the lesson that the world is awful, people are basically evil, and the best news is the bloodiest news.

And yet — sometimes I feel obligated (to whom, I ask myself?) to tone down my posts, to make sure I include a dollop of gloom-and-doom to the news stories that I highlight here.

For example:

Yesterday was the International Day of United Nations Peacekeepers, which honors the people who have served and continue to serve in UN peacekeeping operations. At this moment, 115 countries are contributing over 100,000 personnel to 15 peacekeeping operations around the globe. (I am amazed that 115 countries were able to agree on anything at all, much less the importance of keeping peace in the world.)

Returning to my earlier point: as soon as I typed that paragraph, I realized how little I know about UN peacekeeping missions. I wondered how often terrible things are done by UN peacekeepers in the name of peace — and I wondered how long it would take one of this blog’s many highly-informed readers to point those atrocities out to me.

Maybe this is just my self-consciousness about my perceived ignorance about the world. (I’m also hearing some rumblings of gender stuff in my words here, like unnecessary fear of intellectual rigor, being wrong, etc. Another day, another post.)

Or maybe it raises a challenging, but highly feasible idea:

This idea makes me wrestle with the complexity of life, with the ways that “good” and “bad” are such relative and shape-shifting terms, and can often sit right next to each other in our lives. Yes, breaking up with my high school boyfriend was bad at the time, but good Goddess! how much good was born from that “bad” time. You all recognize those same threads in your pasts, right?

Of course, it’s far more challenging to affirm the good in something bad when you’re in the thick of it. That’s when it gets really juicy.

So, with all of this off my chest, I march on, continuing to seek the good in the “bad news”, the flowers sprouting in the compost.

Or, to put it this way:

“I think the press, including TV journalism, has an ethical responsibility, a sacred responsibility, a service mission … to make good news just as entertaining (as we’ve made sexy the violence).”
— Marianne Williamson

Forget JT.

I’M bringing SexyBack.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 8:08 am and is filed under Beauty in a Wicked World, Career/Life, In The News, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.