It's Bad News Week/Month/Year

 

Yes, I'm Curious Pam. I'm curious about the world and lots of things in it. Particularly when I was teaching, I tried to stay abreast of the news because my students would often ask me questions about current events and I wanted to be informed about them.

 

Now, I'm Irritated Pam. I no longer watch the television news because it's too depressing. Yes, occasionally there might be a 'soft' good news story, usually involving an animal, just before the weather. Once a week, The Project runs a segment of good news stories, and ABC News has a 'good news' section also. But people around the world are doing life affirming, brilliant things; we just don't get to hear about them, because apparently most of the news networks seem to think that we want to be fed a diet of disaster, violence, tragedy and crime. The same can be said for the tabloid newspapers.

 

I'm not asking for unicorns and rainbows every day. I have friends who are journalists (and some former students, too) and I know that they work damn hard to do their absolute best to deliver news that is ethical, informed and balanced. It seems that someone higher up the chain makes editorial decisions that result in the fodder that is delivered to us daily.

 

I checked the ABC news headlines as I was waiting for the ads to finish at the movies today, and this is what I saw:



 

Apparently the only tragedy among these stories is a yacht having to retire from the Sydney to Hobart race. Yes, tragedy is in inverted commas, presumably because it's a quotation from someone associated with Wild Oats XI. (By the time I got home and checked the story, it had been updated and 'tragedy' was no longer in the story. Perhaps someone saw sense?) But this was a hydraulic problem which affected the keel and presumably the steering of the yacht (I am an old sailor from way back, but that's another story.) A tweet from Wild Oats XI was quick to point out that the 'crew on board are safe', and fair enough. Many of us remember the real tragedy of the 1998 race when six lives were lost in an enormous storm that engulfed the race.

Please don't think I'm picking on the sailors who are much braver than me and take on this race. It's just that I couldn't help but think that missing people, dying people, people blinded by a shooting, and drowning people (can you see a trend here?) are probably more 'tragic' than the yacht story. Couldn't the headline have been different? Couldn't there have been more stories like the one about George Michael?

Perhaps I'm getting cranky in my old age. I've certainly had an opportunity to reassess my world view since my surgery. There are good things happening in the world, and the ABC does report them. To finish, here's a good news story worth sharing:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-30/campbell-project-365-sees-teddy-bears-made-for-charity/7458530

Rant over. For now.

Jodie Picoult and an ugly Australian

I've been in hospital recently, and because it was difficult for me to focus my eyes for a while, I listened to podcasts and audiobooks. I hadn't read a Jodie Picoult novel for a while, so I chose Small Great Things as one of the audiobooks. The title is a nod to a quote from Martin Luther King.

In the author's afterword she said how she had wanted to write a novel about race for some time, but had felt inadequate to the task. Ultimately she completed the research that was needed and the result is this fantastic book. It revolves around an African American labour and delivery nurse called Ruth Jefferson, and is set in the recent past. The white supremacist parents of a newborn child refuse to have to Ruth touch their child, in spite of the fact that she is a nurse with twenty years' experience and a nursing degree from Yale. I won't spoil the plot line for you by saying any more!

You don't need to be Einstein to work out that along with race, prejudice is a key theme of the novel. We would like to think that 'that sort of thing' doesn't happen, but it does, and it happens in our own backyard.

In a bitter irony, I witnessed it myself when I was a patient in the ICU following my surgery. Many of the nurses were Asian, some from the Philippines, and I especially remember a beautiful Buddhist RN called Jackie who was the gentlest of souls and who had a knack for getting me to stop crying and focus on putting my energy into relaxing and getting better. Bless you, Jackie.