Oh my, but the news is all bad.
The economy, don’t know if you’ve heard, is making sucking noises like a five-year-old on an empty juice box. There is armed conflict in every corner of the world, and not even that bracing kind of “Over There” conflict from the good old days, but the most depressing kind of armed conflict, conflict born out of hatred, money and even worse, nothing in particular. The planet’s fragile ecology has a first-class seat on the universe’s fastest hell-bound handbasket. The internet, instead of becoming a tool for the democratization of ideas and the swift provision of information, has devolved into a petri dish for sexual deviants, no-talent wannabe’s, economic predators and fraudulent Nigerians. Our younger generations are filled with self-important, self-aggrandizing, self-abusing twits with a giant sense of entitlement. The next person who sneezes on you could be Patient Zero for the next pandemic to make the leap to humans from birds, civet cats, howler monkeys or Mr. Snuffleupagus.
The Hamilton Tiger-Cats, Toronto Raptors and Montreal Canadiens are all moribund. We’re all getting older, which in our culture means we’re too wrinkly, too fat, too hairless, too slow and too unaware of Twitter, whatever the hell that is. And the snow in my backyard has finally melted, which means that it’s time to pick up four months’ worth of semi-frozen dog poop.
The new is grim.
But then the news always is.
Ah ha, you say. What about that miraculous story about the girl rescued from the bottom of a well?
Well, the real story there is the bad news that she fell down the well in the first place. The same thing applies to the kidnapping victim who turns up unharmed, the treatment for the terrible disease or the airplane crash that killed no one. The “good news” is really just the absence of worse news. For example: Terrible news – a girl was kidnapped. Awful news – millions of people from a vile disease. Appalling news – an airplane crashed. The fact that the girl escaped, the disease can be treated or the passengers all walked away simply means that the bad news is not as bad as it could have been.
No way, you say. Look at all the good news we received in the last little while like Barack Obama winning the American presidency, next year’s Canadian winter Olympians winning medals by the dozen, or that fired chief justice being reinstated in Pakistan? Well the problem is that all of those things are only good news in your opinion. Obama’s election was terrible news to staunch Republicans. The Canadians’ dominance of winter sport is bad news to speed skating fans in Scandinavia, Germany, Japan and Russia. Even the return of the Pakistani chief justice is bad news to the people who wanted him fired in the first place.
So, all this “good news” is really just “news that could be good or bad depending on how you look at it.”
Seriously, there is no such thing as good news. But you know what? That’s not a problem. News, by definition, is always bad or at best, partially bad or bad only to a small portion of the population. Anything that happens suddenly is always bad or nearly-bad. Accomplishment takes time. If the stock market indices bounce up sharply tomorrow, that would be good, but no one would care about that good news if they dropped right back down again the next day. Truly good news comes only from sustained improvement and when do you write that headline? What is the threshold? When do you break out the Second Coming typeface and declare: “Economy Fixed. Everyone Relax”?
The answer is that you never do. You never know when the news is really good until after it happens. You never know when you’ve met the person who will change your life for the better until your life changes for the better. You never know when the treatment for the disease has really worked until it never comes back. You never know at the time and the news only reports what it knows now. It’s the way news works.
So this breaking new just in … if the news is all bad, that not news.
