Let's Focus on Spring

Spring is wonderful. In Ramona, where the seasons are more subtle, spring this year is spectacular due to the incredible rains we had over the “winter” season (we got more than 26 inches in the Mussey Grade area). To top it off, it rained again in May!  Maybe to make up for that terrible spate of overheated weather during a week of Santa Ana, also in May. As a friend of mine once said when I asked her what the weather pattern is here, “Just stick around.”

So now that it is so beautiful, now that birds are beginning to nest in the birdhouses we put up to entice them so we can hear up close and personal their joyous trilling, now that the sun is shining and the earth is full of water for growing things, what occupies most of our mainstream media? Blood, killing, threats, mayhem, division, hatred, competitiveness, resentment and a healthy measure of gossip, innuendo and general unhappiness.

Where are these folks living? What world do they inhabit? 

Radio and TV news organizations, especially the 24-hour cable types, have a lot of time to fill. But I am amazed that they are not amazed at the beauty of life – and that they don't report on the 95 percent of the world that is working.

I say 95 percent because it is the minority, always a minority, of the human race that causes the problems. I say that because I remember when I went as a United Nations observer to South Africa for the 1994 voting that resulted in the peaceful election of Nobel Peace Prize Winner Nelson Mandela (who defeated his fellow Nobel Peace Prize Winner F.W. de Klerk – they shared the prize in 1993 for their work ending apartheid). Folks back home asked, “Aren’t you afraid?” I said, "No." I wasn’t afraid because the violence leading up to the election was caused by something less than 5 percent of the people in South Africa.

That meant that 95 percent got up every day and fed themselves and their children, went to work and came home to whatever home they had and had dinner and went to bed.  That means today that 95 percent of the people of the world (over six billion, with 5 percent equaling some 300,000,000) are living their lives peacefully.

One has to ask what is wrong, then, with radio and TV news that drives sadness, despair and a kind of derangement of our shared and collective human experience. I know from personal experience that news organizations generally do not encourage or support stories that don’t involve conflict and disagreement. I know that reporters know this and there is plenty out there to report on in order to get a prime position or even any position on air or on the page. 

Maybe we should let news outlets know that we are happy to be alive, happy to enjoy that which we can and we would wish this happiness for everyone. If we and they approached local, national, state and world problems with the desire to increase happiness, we might just create a different world. And in that quest, we need to be informed about the problems we all face – but not every moment of the day.  This kind of reporting encourages cynicism and disengagement, not hopefulness and solutions. We all lose.

In the meantime, I am enjoying spring, the fact that I am here to enjoy it and the ability to marvel at the mystery of the changing rhythms of the natural world. I am stopping to smell the roses and I hope you are too.

Diane Conklin is a Ramona resident and a new blogger, who will write when moved and hopes that you enjoy her new blog, Ruminations on RamonaPatch.com