It's really fucked up - Stressed, irritable, and agitated - Navigating our daily news

Why do we feel obliged to be well informed?
 Our sense of duty and sophistication have even reached a level where newspapers serve as an indicator of the educated. Tell me what newspaper you read, and I’ll tell you who you are.

I, however, got tired of being bombarded with news.
 Periodically, after reading or watching the news, I showed the same symptoms: on the one hand, I felt sad, depressed, and helpless; on the other, I was stressed, irritable, and agitated.
At first, I thought it was alright to have these feelings and considered them something I couldn’t do anything about. I accepted them because I didn’t want to be “ignorant” or to be “out.”
 But I noticed that other people didn’t feel as compromised as I did.

I was less and less able to look at what was happening in the world from an egotistic point of view, separate and detached from my core. I realized more and more how I myself, how we ourselves, in a seemingly endless cycle of cause and effect, have produced and continue to produce the world of today.
How can we look at it with open eyes without feeling the pain and heartache?

There is a saying in Tibetan Buddhism that is quite bold in its visual image. It goes something like this: If you put feces in a beautiful vase and polish the outside to make it look even more beautiful, the feces in the vase will still be feces. And will not change.

Ice-T, founder of the heavy metal band Bodycount, put it this way in a 1992 song, “You know, sometimes I sit at home and watch TV and wonder what it would be like to live in a place like The Cosby Show or Ozzie and Harriet, where the cops come and take your cat out of the tree and all your friends die of old age. But you know, I live in South Central Los Angeles and unfortunately…. SHIT AIN’T LIKE THAT! IT’S REAL FUCKED UP!”

To realize how it’s really fucked up I don’t have to live in South Central Los Angeles. Everywhere we have imposed our split mind state on the world, which it in turn  reflects. Behind an incrusted heart and a beautiful face it shamefully hides corruption, greed and abuse. This world is not The Cosby Show, that much is true. But how can I live in such a world? And stay sane?

At one point I had envisioned producing a newspaper or website that presented only “good news.” In the end, I didn’t make it because I realised that things don’t change when change is instigated from the outside.
 Who is interested in good news anyway? Idealists and do-gooders? Probably not even them, because a world of good news makes idealists and do-gooders useless, while a world of bad news keeps them alive.

We are like smokers who are offered an e-cigarette with a nicotine-free vapor solution. Even though smokers know better than anyone else how bad tobacco cigarettes are for their own health, they scoff at the “healthy” e-cigarette and cling to smoking “real” cigarettes – with tobacco, nicotine, and tar.
In the same manner we hang onto the habit of being fed the bad and sensational news. We’ve even become so accustomed to it that we don’t want a change of menu.

“It’s just a movie,” people say to me when I refuse to watch horror movies or turn away from looking at scenes of violence. As if I didn’t know that they were just movies.
But movie or not, it doesn’t look or feel any different to me: It triggers the same kind of pain, nausea and anxiety in my body and mind.

The world we face every day must have numbed us, because we show no inclination to turn away from its filth, its feces. It is like a nightmare from which we refuse to wake up. As if to say: At least we can stay in the familiar warmth and mustiness of our own excretions and odors, whatever the nightmare may be.
 We lull ourselves into believing that it has nothing to do with us and that others are to blame.

The darkness is not dispelled because the sun takes its place. It is the earth turning toward the sun. I read the other day.

When we are in the shadow, we cannot blame the darkness, we cannot blame the lack of sun. There is nothing and no one we can blame. It is we who can turn away from the darkness and turn toward the light, to come out of the shadow into the light.

The day came when I finally had enough of dreaming the recurring nightmare. I turned away from the familiar but suffocating embrace and walked into the unknown, toward the light.
 And the longer I walk, the closer I get to it. The less I see my own shadow, the more I see nothing but the light.