For Wilshire Baptist Church
The TV news tease was, “Texas grandmother helps solve yarn heist,” but it was fake news. Not the heist part, not the fact that a grandmother solved it, but the picture painted by the use of that word, “grandmother.” The mental picture is a gray-haired, feeble old woman fighting off a bandit with her knitting needles.
But that’s not the truth of the story. The woman was perfectly healthy and mentally agile. Yes, she was a grandmother, but she was 59. There was no need to say she was a grandmother. It had no bearing on the story. It’s just a word used to paint a false picture to get your attention.
It’s endemic of so much that we read and view, and it makes me ask: Why do we want more than is really there? And why do we want more “bad” than is really there? We see a storm report on TV that says a house has been “destroyed” or “obliterated,” and they show a structure that is damaged but not gone; a roof has been “torn off” and we see sheet metal blowing in the wind. Is it the news people wanting to grab our attention with the drama of what might be, or is it we consumers who are addicted to disaster?
And if we are to blame — if we are just being served what we’ve asked for — then what is it in us that craves catastrophe? Why does our culture lunge headfirst into “the valley of the shadow of death” rather than seek the serenity of “lying down beside still waters”? What does our infatuation with end time and apocalyptic stories say about us?
It’s even driving our politics and our science. Politicians fish for votes with doomsday predictions, while billionaires build rockets to escape Earth and colonize Mars one step ahead of the inevitable apocalypse.
I thought Jesus came to ease our fears and invite us to a more fruitful, peaceful and prosperous life — not just in the sweet bye and bye but right here and now. Not necessarily a life of wealth and plenty, not a life where everything is “even-Steven,” but a life where respect, generosity and hospitality rule the day. And yet our obsession with mayhem and chaos – not to solve it but bathe in it – seems to indicate we don’t really want that.
I don’t have a solution, but I do have a request for all the sensationalizing, apocalyptic fear mongers out there: just stop, please.