Someone Call Me If There's A Hurricane Coming.

I don't want to alarm anyone, but I don't watch the news. I have friends who are news junkies, and they can't understand how I can live without knowing what's going on in the world, but I say that makes us even because I can't understand how they can get out of bed in the morning after hearing what IS going on. I am not naive. I mean, maybe I am a little naive, in general, but when it comes to the news, this is a calculated choice.

It started simply enough. We have children who are very sensitive, and we live in a big city where someone has been murdered in the general vicinity of our home pretty much every night. Every day we would hear bad news,and not far around the world, but from right here in Central Florida. Kasey Anthony, Jennifer Kesse, Trayvon Martin...need I go on? Not to mention our local grocery store being held up at gun point, or car-jackings in our mall parking lot. We had to react to the news the way we reacted to shows that may surprise us with profanity, and quickly turn it off before we had to field a million questions from scared little kids about things like, "What does fatal mean?". The thing is, the news is not good. (I'm sure this is not "news" to anyone.) Occasionally the terrible updates would be peppered with something nice, like a family leaving a 200% tip for a waitress on Christmas Eve, but mostly, just terrorizing. And here's what I decided. 95% of it I don't need to know.

I don't need to know when a little girl goes missing in Aruba, or mudslides destroy 300 homes on the West Coast. There is nothing I can do about the suffering woman who drove her van full of children into the ocean. In short, I would take it in, and bear the burden of the entire world because it was piped into my living room. Then I would stress over it, and worry about my children, and my family. It bred fear in me, and quite frankly, in a lot of ways I think watching the news has gotten (for some people) like "rubber-necking" when coming upon the scene of a car accident. They watch because its hard to look away. They watch because of the shock factor of how some of these things could ever be true. In most cases though, we can't help, and we can only pray.

Every night when I say prayers with my 6 year old, Trevor says, "God, thank you for my mommy, and my daddy, and everyone in this world, even the bad people. Please help them know you so they won't be bad anymore, and please don't let anyone get hurt tonight. In Jesus precious, precious, name. Amen." I don't know. I'm not a prayer expert, but that about covers it. No terrorizing news required. I am not sticking my head in the sand refusing to accept the world I live in. I get it. It's bad. I'm just not going to fill my house with it.

There are some things I need to know, like Red Sox scores, but I have my ways of finding those out. In regard to the rest, someone call me if there's a hurricane coming. I'm gonna need water and gas for the generator.

“I love Huey Lewis, but not the News, because the News is too depressing.”
― Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale