I’m getting sick of bad news.
More accurately, I’m getting sick from bad news.
I don’t mean figuratively sick, either—I mean that it is making me physically ill.
I wake up in the morning, and at first I forget the angry, bitter people are there and I feel quite fine.
It’s as if a few hours predawn respite has reset me: the sun hits my face and for a tiny sliver of time with my head still on the pillow, I feel all the emotions one should feel upon the arrival of a new day: hope, joy, optimism, gratitude.
I inhale slowly and deeply for a moment.
Then I wake up and refresh my phone, and I see that the bad news-bringers are here and already hard at work—and I feel sick to my stomach:
I see them leveraging a young woman’s brutal murder as a political talking point;
recklessly perpetuating false stereotypes of Muslims and immigrants;
justifying every kind of corruption and bigotry from our leaders;
persecuting transgender teenagers just trying to get through a day in Middle School;
Tweeting out unthinkable verbal sewage from safely behind anonymous handles;
manufacturing nonsensical extremist conspiracies theories, they themselves don’t even comprehend.
And as the massive wave of their enmity washes over me for yet another consecutive day, I find myself sinking within the flood before my feet even hit the floor.
Social media tends to do this to all of us. Since we’re usually following predominately people who agree with us and who are burdened by the things we’re burdened by—our timelines and newsfeeds often become congested with the never ending traffic of all those mutually agreed upon terrible things—until our minds are gridlocked by despair.
We can easily begin believing that these angry, fearful people are the majority; that their hateful hearts are humanity’s default, that all is most surely lost—that all the news is breaking badly.
If you feel that way, friend, stop it.
This is fake news.
Good people still inhabit this place—and we need to see them.
And not just see them, we need to dwell on them, to fixate on them; to allow our minds to linger on their goodness and obsess on their kindness and be taken aback at their unthinkable capacity for beauty.
The good news-bringers are literally everywhere right now;
showing compassion to strangers,
doing small, unseen acts of decency,
toiling humbly in anonymity,
living generously toward people,
loving counterintuitively.
There is glorious, heartwarming, defiantly human work being done all around you in this very moment, and if you could get yourself to see it—hope would be involuntary.
Don’t let the heaviness of absorbing only the sorrow and suffering squeeze out the possibility from you. Seek out something that will lighten you.
Shift your gaze from the loud, attention-sucking bad news for a minute and look around you. Take a hope inventory:
Where specifically do you see equality and diversity and compassion and love winning?
Who do you see being the kind of person the world needs right now?
What or who gives you reason to believe that better days are still on the horizon?
The world needs to know.
I’d love for you to comment below or wherever you read this, with the name of someone good, or the story of humanity surprising you, or of a group of people or an organization you know, who is being amazing to their fellow humans.
We can make beauty go viral in days when ugly things tend to steal the bandwidth.
I don’t want you to deny the suffering is there or to sidestep the very real dangers or to pretend many things aren’t quite awful—but I do want you to allow a dissenting opinion in because it deserves to be heard.
Friends, we need to amplify love, so that we don’t forget how present and active it still is.
The world needs some good news.
Give it some.
Be good news-bringers.
Order John’s forthcoming book ‘HOPE AND OTHER SUPERPOWERS” here!
