A Smile Among the Frowns
When I speak to healthcare audiences, I emphasize our tendency to focus on the negative and even our inadvertent desire to out negative one another. For instance, if someone says, “I’ve had this cold for a week,” we’re likely to respond, “I had a cold for seven years once.” We seem to thrive on pointing out the negative.
The weather is too cold except when it’s too hot. The restaurant food is not as good as the last time we were here. Our joints ache, our eyes are getting bad, and our hearing is worse but luckily, there’s nothing worth listening to anyway. Gas is too high, home prices are too low, and I can remember when a cup of coffee was a fifty cents.
There’s so much negativity out there, when I run into someone positive, I think, “Boy is he out of touch with reality.”
While I must admit that I too can be the King of the Whiners, it’s not completely our fault. We’re given a smorgasbord of negativity every single day in the newspapers, magazines, and television shows that we absorb.
I subscribe to USA today because it’s the McDonald’s of news and I can get a nice snapshot of the news and still have daylight left. Today, I glanced at the third page of the news section and here were a few of the headlines:
Colorado rock slide damages bridge, road
Inmate ODs on pills before execution
Conservative Calif. senator says he’s gay
Six hospitalized after bad injetions
Oregon couple get 16 months in son’s death
Train collides with truck
Is it any wonder we’re negative? All of these articles have a definite negative feel to them. Even though there might be positive stories, it’s the negative slant that tends to grab us and it’s the negative slant that sells newspapers.
As a side note, the inmate who OD’d on pills is now in the prison hospital. The medical staff said he was not yet ready to “be released” for execution. So, I guess if you take too many pills, you’re not in good enough shape to be given a lethal injection. Really?
Buried on the news page today amidst all the tragedy and destruction is a two sentence article that read, “Mary Josephine Ray, who was certified as the oldest person living in the United States, died at the age of 114 years, 294 days.”
OK, so it’s not necessarily a “positive” article but it has the potential of being one of the most inspirational articles in the entire newspaper. Yet, it only captured 2 sentences.
I don’t know Mary Josephine Ray, so I went looking for information on the internet. Here’s the photo I found of her 111th birthday party:
That picture says it all. I can guarantee that to make it to 114, you can’t focus on the negative. In fact, one obituary said that Mary “just enjoyed life.” Can you see it in her eyes?
It’s a shame when a woman who clearly figured out how to live is only worth two sentences in a newspaper while a state senator’s gay-ness gets a full paragraph and the rising price of gas gets half of the front page.
I want to live in a world where Mary Josephine Ray is plastered all over the front page of the newspaper and we have to look long and hard to find out that our home price fell another half a percent. If the world was like that, we’d all live to be 114.
Ron