Skip to content

What About This…? 3.20.2014

By Wayne William Cipriano

As we watch television, listen to radio, read the paper, flip through the magazine, scope the Internet, we have to evaluate what we perceive not only in terms of its veracity but also its probability.

Media has exploded in our lives particularly due to the communica­tion and recording devices we own. Because of this, we see so many well-documented true yet very, very rare stories; some of which are ex­tremely unsettling. And, some of us begin to view the world as a very dangerous place.

Almost all media start with the most widely relevant, generally important information but because the 24-hour news cycle requires more and more information be transmitted, media sometimes falls to reporting little more than the sen­sation to its never-satisfied news customers: us.

Often, dangers so rarely encoun­tered become threatening to us merely because media has so loudly proclaimed them. How much danger do these tragedy-stories, these horror adventures that befell some unfortunate individual or group tens or hundreds or thousands of miles away pose to us? Frequently, almost invariably, little or none.

I am temped to list a few of the “everyday” tragedies from just today’s media. I refrain because one on the list might remind someone of a very real occurrence. But the overwhelming super-majority who read such a list will see the items represent nothing more than phobia food.

We spend so much of our lives guarding against a danger that we will never encounter, no one in our family will experience, no one we know will ever have in their lives, that we are poisoning time we could relish.

Protect ourselves from the real dangers, sure. Spend even a minute of our precious lives worrying about all that weird stuff, absolutely not!

And, it’s not that hard deciding which is which.