This just in. More than 70 million children in this country went to school yesterday without being attacked, shot at, pursued by predators, or injured. In other news, more than 120 million commuters went to work without having an accident. In the skies above, over 850,000 flights arrived safely at their destination without crashing or stranding travelers on the tarmac.
News? No, not really. The word clearly has its origin in the word "new". That's largely the sense of the word. "News" is not the ordinary or mundane, the everyday or usual. You will never hear that stuff unless it is used in contrast to an event outside the normal. You see, news, in order to be "news", must be abnormal. It's not news if it is commonplace.
This, of course, isn't really a complaint. It is simply the nature of things. We know the normal. The function of the news is to tell us what we don't know. It is not to educate us, but to inform us of events that are occurring different from everyday occurrences. That's just the way it is. You know, for instance, that the sun will come up every morning. To have a news anchor tell you on the nightly news that the sun will come up tomorrow is pointless. You know that. To tell you that tomorrow it will not come up -- now that would be news. It's just the nature of things.
News, however, does become a problem when it is our primary source of reality. When we form our view of the world around us based on the news we receive, we end up twisted. That should seem obvious. I just don't think it is. You see, if your reality is defined by the unusual, then the usual won't be ... real.
Consider, for instance, the germophobe. Literally billions of people are exposed every day to germs. Our bodies are designed to handle that. We have an immune system. We go through the vast majority of our lives unruffled by our immersion into this biological warfare behind the scenes. Not a problem. But a germophobe has acquired an exaggerated sense of awareness and concern about the bacterial and viral world. Too many stories about the flu and colds, meningitis and the Ebola virus, a case of Lyme disease or a lice epidemic. These things are reported on the news. They are not reported because they are everyday occurrences, but the fears arise because they are reported at all. This is a case of forming your view of reality based on the news rather than on reality.
We all do it. Admit it. Life is dangerous. Crime is high. Your chance of dying on the road or in the air or something like it is high. It's certainly higher right after the news talks about a plane crash or a nasty pile up. Kids are not safe outside. All Catholic priests are pedophiles. Men cannot be trusted. Piece by piece we end up forming our worldview on a system devised not to tell us about how things really are, but about the unusual things around us. And people wonder why I say that sin rots the brain.
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