“If It Bleeds, It Leads”

A very good cartoon was brought to my attention, showing a crowd of loving, peaceful people being ignored by media while all the cameras are on a tiny group of Nazis and their ilk.

I don’t consider this an indictment of media. I think it relates to a truth of human nature: we pay more attention to the acutely malign than the benign. If there are ten thousand happy homes, the crowd collects at the one that is burning. We talk more about the tiger in the forest than the million sunflowers in the field. Rubbernecking at an accident on the freeway. If you hit your thumb with a hammer, what do you focus on? The owie, or the 99.9% of your body that is just fine?

This is what we are.

And it is CRITICAL to understand this, so that the 24/7 news cycle that is just giving us what we ask for (“the squeaky wheel gets the grease”) doesn’t convince us that EVERYTHING is going wrong. The world isn’t burning because one house is, even if it’s all over the news and you can smell the smoke in your nice safe kitchen.

This tendency to focus on what is wrong is a survival drive. It has to be taken in stride. Frankly in dealing with such issues, a healthy syntax might be 80% dealing with the problem RIGHT NOW. 20% asking where the problem originated. What causes and triggers it. The point being to cut off the weed at the root. If the roof is leaking, you can either run around putting down tarps and pans, or actually, like, maybe patch the roof?