As I looked through CNN’s top stories this week, I saw story after story about death, tragedy and coming troubles.
Reading through each article, I couldn’t help but notice that there wasn’t a single positive news story to be found. Surely someone in this country has saved a life, helped out a neighbor or surprised someone this week. Common sense, or maybe optimism, tells me that there’s no way our world could be as cruel as CNN depicted.
I think we can agree my intuition is correct, but if I planned on reading the news to confirm my hopes, my hopes would be crushed. I’d have never known that anyone in the world did something constructive this week.
In many ways, the media’s decision to feature mostly shock-value stories is at the expense of our culture’s outlook.
This sort of trend is very troubling and very detrimental to the attitudes of the American people. It leads to a negative society full of people who focus on those hurting others, rather than the good citizens that selflessly help others each and every day.
If all the media reports on is death, war and disaster then the nation begins to forget about all the positive actions that Americans are doing everyday. It may be an unfortunate fact of human nature that we tend to take interest in negativity, one that the media likes to capitalize on, but that doesn’t mean uplifting stories aren’t worth running.
Take, for example, a man from Utah donated his kidney to a complete stranger, hoping to save one life. He ended up saving three people’s lives. Or the man who scaled a ladder that was suspended horizontally five stories up to save a man in a burning apartment. Five stories in the air, the man walked across the ladder to save another man from his burning apartment.
It gets better: the nation’s amazing response to the floods in Colorado. There’s been a massive outpouring of donated money, supplies and time to help those people who were so tragically affected by the disaster recover a semblance of their lives.
This nation is full of heroes. Sure, they may not be radically changing the world each and every day, but they are doing little acts of kindness that can go a long way in brightening someone’s day, week or life. These acts of kindness can change peoples’ outlook and attitude in ways you would never expect.
A positive attitude and a little kindness can go a long way, and all it takes is one domino to be tipped.
This week as we read the news, instead of focusing on the negative things in life, let’s focus on paying it forward and making the world a better place little by little.