I struggle with watching The News.

It’s almost always bad news. It’s been very bad over the last few days. And knowing everything about something we can do nothing about is not conducive to positive action or good mental health.

Seriously. What can each of us actually do to help the situation in the Middle East right now, other than take sides (amazingly some people use tragedy mainly as proof that they are right about this, that or the other…I’ve been that person and I never liked that version of myself) or make minor adjustments to our own viewpoints? Or perhaps put some coins in the particular charity box that is being thrust in front of us?

The News is almost always biased.

Hundreds or thousands of people losing their lives in one part of the planet is seen as more important than when the same thing happens in another part of the planet. For instance. Sometimes just one death in our part of the world, or on “our side” is seen as far more newsworthy than some tragic disaster, involving many times that number, in a far off place.

And we end up giving all of our emotional attention to the one tragedy at the expense of all the others that didn’t make the cut today. But those tragedies, however “small” or “irrelevant” or “far away”, still mattered just as much to the people involved. And in truth we are almost always very distant (i.e. we have absolutely no direct personal connection) from everything that we hear about.

When The News isn’t bad, it’s almost always trivial. Good news is treated as fluff. Something to give a bit of levity to the bad news. Not as a serious matter in itself. What does that say about our concept of the word “News”?

I’ve said all this before, in one way or another, I’m pretty sure.

Yet I still take the news, in all the many forms it comes at us these days, very seriously. And I’m trying to work out a reliable, constructive, and enabling way to digest what is happening in the world.

It’s a struggle.

For now though, I still don’t often watch.

But when I do I really don’t want to be the fella staring at the accident, goggle eyed, curious (nosy), helpless and slightly relieved that it wasn’t me, as I pass by Somebody Else’s Grief.

If I can’t help, it’s not helpful.