Michigan winters keep me less active, more housebound, and less focused on fun projects outside. I get bored. This can be dangerous.
Just a few years ago I found myself reading/viewing polluted ‘information’ during my waking hours. The habit quickly grew to become a major problem.
I wallowed in news about surface-to-air missiles in the hands of unstable governments, genocide, dirty bomb threats, and the rants of a mad dictator ignoring his starving nation... I absorbed stories about awful human beings doing terrible things to other human beings. I anguished about countries that were falling apart, worried about terrifying diseases in Africa with no cures...I was pummeled by inane politics.
Moving around in this sordid world became a habit.
I became an avid ‘information’ junkie.
Each day I drank in the latest natural disasters with my coffee, until my very fabric was drenched in despair. There was so much Bad News filling the TV and my computer (a marvelous tool I was using unwisely) that I grew seriously depressed.
One day, numb with it all, I opened the computer and searched through Drudge, Fox, CNN and the other alphabet news agencies for substantive news. I purged information that was stupid, horrible, sad, ridiculous or prurient- or that was none of my business: (i.e.-hearing what Patrick Swayze’s dying words were, or watching an athlete beat his wife unconscious).
(Good God! I’d become a voyeur- a peeping Tom.)
I wrote down the factual information that remained. This took no time at all.
It was incredibly meager.
95% was mental heroin, or back alley rubbish- Or NOMB.
Just 5% was factually based hard news.
Years ago, the powers-that-be decided to go with 24/7 news. BUT. There were not nearly enough substantive articles for 24 hours of every day. So news-hungry journalists began to introduce ‘filler’ stories - Sensational things- about who had eaten someone, or been eaten (by crocs, for example,) or who had stored their dead mother in the broom closet for ten years. Fascinated viewers like me flocked to these sites to absorb prurient or embarrassing photos- such as singer/dancers with ‘wardrobe malfunctions.’ Anything sensational, outrageous, stupid or pathetic that could be shown or written about was on offer.
Good taste’s ‘red line’ had been obliterated.
Take TV ads, for instance. People moan about their hemorrhoids, men fret over drooping fifth appendages, women are victims of toenail fungus or vaginitis. Shingles and cold sore sufferers groan, overactive bladders pull their owners around in crowded bowling alleys, six different catheters are demonstrated, and even loaded pink lower bowels tiptoe daintily through fine restaurants. These ads are repeated, over and over and over. I never bothered to press ‘mute,’ so they saturated my brain.
(Remember the appealing ad for a breakfast cereal- with a delightful child-actor called Mikey, way back when? Those were the good old days.)
Today, absolutely nothing is off-limits, or private.
Positive news sells. It does. But it always has an awful beginning- a puppy severely burned in a fire, who’d been adopted, for example.
I’d hold the story to my heart with relief.
Pathetic.
I had become inured to bad taste, violence and awful, useless information. More and more and more of it registered less and less and less, until its daily ingestion had dialed down this human being’s sensitivity/revulsion meter to 0.
I knew this because I would watch cartoon bowels moving, or read of atrocities- and the meter didn’t twitch.
Desperate, I wrote down two facts:
1. Terrible things were happening every minute of every day everywhere, that I couldn’t fix.
But- I. Was. Absorbing. Them.
2. This soul-killing avalanche of life’s bad events was obliterating the mountain of good that existed. I was numb to it.
I had to reset my sensitivity meter!
Was this even possible?
I scribbled the names of the culprits (Dee Blair topped the list). The computer and the TV followed in close succession.
Ha!
I quit those, Cold Turkey.
Television and computer ‘newspapers’- including Drudge, Fox, CNN and all the other ‘information’ networks (and even the much more factual Wall Street Journal) were eliminated for one year.
Then I’d see.
I spent the first unplugged week deeply anxious, desperate for input and occasionally tearful. I needed my fix! I feared that I was missing something-
And then, I realized that I was!!
I felt lighter for its absence.
I felt cleaner.
My husband kept me informed about world events in a general way. (Sometimes we’d watch ‘clean’ TV documentaries, like Nova, or travel adventures, but nothing else.)
After few weeks my anxiety lessened and my deep depression began to lift. But- there were times I was tempted to go back...
That fact really upset me.
Getting clean was going to be hard.
The deeper change took much longer.
Unplugged, I slowly relearned the mostly unsullied world’s realities and little kindnesses, and better appreciated children, who see the world with fresh, optimistic eyes. I adopted Bryn-dog’s philosophy of living for the moment. I went outside even in really snowy weather, to play. My anguish and helplessness about the state of the world greatly lessened. I had more time to do things, and began to notice a bounce in my step.
Exactly one year later I switched on the TV.
And was shocked. SHOCKED. I turned it off right quick.
And smiled.
It was possible!
I had Reset!!
****
An afterthought: There are no more random turn-ons. I’ve chosen just one hour to catch up on substantive news. Bret Baier hosts ‘Special Report’ on Fox, at 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. This award-winning program strives to report the day’s news without bias. The last twenty minutes features a panel of three educated, highly respected journalists from both political parties who comment on the day’s events, often with humor, and usually with great insight.
It is exactly enough.