I’m a great believer in not watching the news.
Especially since I became a parent. There is a British comedian called Al Murray (aka ‘The Pub Landlord‘) who observes that the minute you have children you suddenly find yourself more right wing. (In context this is really funny – sadly you won’t get the joke here.) The often grotesque and explicit images fed to us via the media – particularly those involving children -literally make me physically sick. I feel that twisting, clawing, eating up inside that comes from observing people in distress…and I don’t like that feeling.
BUT if there is a cry for help, I do not turn away and do nothing.
I have written recently about the idea of contrast and we can use how negative events in our lives as a defining mechanism – as a way for us to observe the devastation and to launch within ourselves the desire for something better.
So when a disaster of the magnitude of the Haiti earthquake takes place, it is for us to take it in. And then to focus intensely on making the situation better.
While the mainstream media glory in the death toll, the footage of bodies piled into tractors and the failures of the emergency systems to fully cope, it is up to us to do whatever it is we can, however small, to construct a different future.
When Kelly Diels launched The Help Haiti Blog challenge (inspired by Danielle La Porte) I was immediately in.
Regular readers will know I am already throwing everything I can at the scarce snippets of time that I have at my fingertips.
But hell, why not start spinning another plate? continue reading…
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