Why I can't just flip the page

Whenever he saw me reading a newspaper, my dad would always ask me to report on one piece of good news.

Although occasionally, a tale of deserving lottery winners or cats with nine lives would leap from the page, usually, the search for positivity would take several minutes of frantic flipping with ink stained thumbs. Thus, in very few words, my father taught me both about the value of optimism, and, more memorably, the pessimistic bias of the popular media.

I sometimes wonder if reading the newspaper is more harm than it's worth. While I am generally a firm believer in the value in staying informed, particularly in local issues that both have an impact on one's life and that one can potentially influence, this is the stuff of the bottom article on page 30. This is not the stuff of headlines.

I don't need to spit out the cliches about sex and violence selling, or how the average person is ignorant to the fact that crime rates are actually decreasing, or whether most headlines have any direct relevance to the lives of the general population. On an intellectual level, I know this. But I still let it all sweep me up on a personal level.

Blurry-eyed and in my pyjamas, I went online Thursday morning, only to be instantaneously bombarded with the same horrific story as the rest of the world. An innocent man, a good man, slain in the most horrific way possible. I found the details searing themselves into my brain, wanting to distract myself from these awful facts I had no right knowing that were cycling through my head, over and over again. Yet, I still felt compelled to read more, to mindlessly click on the next link, preparing myself for another sharp breath of air as my eyes absorbed some of the cruelest and horrid details I'd ever read.

And then it was just too much, as though the reality of the event just collided with me at once, and the tears began plummeting. Tears because, as sensationalistic as it was already becoming, less than 24 hours later, what grounded the story was that it happened to someone very real.

Perhaps this is why I shouldn't read the news. In order to be able to process the vivid declarations of accidents, overdoses, assaults and murders, you almost have to stop seeing the people, and just focus on the event as a story by itself. And I've never been very good at reiterating "Oh, isn't that awful" and just flipping the page.