I can no longer bring myself to watch the world news. anyone else?

[Amandistan]

After all the ISIS crimes against humanity in the news, I can no longer watch any more. My stomach just feels really sick every time I bother to keep up with it.

 Mass executions, killing kids, abducting women, forcing women to be sex slaves, Genocide of Christians and any other religious minority, beheading,burning,torturing, threatening etc.

Bad news from The Ukraine. Racist Cops choking and shooting people to death.

Not to mention all the other horrible things that human beings have done to one another.

This makes it seem that all humans are are evil when in reality it's just a minority. Nobody bothers to report kind deeds and the lighter news is crap celebrity gossip where the verbally abuse someone for dressing incorrectly.


I know that it's good to be aware of world events but this news of the past few weeks is deeply upsetting to the point that it effects my sanity.

Anyone else care to add any thoughts? Agree or disagree? 

[jackroadkill]

Funny you should say that, Amanda.  I stopped watching, listening to or Googling the news a few weeks ago for much the same reasons as you.  I've always been really interested in current affairs and believed that there was a human duty to know about and understand as much of the world as possible but it was starting to really get me down (I don't like to make a big deal of it but I have depression and have been having a rocky patch recently) so I've given myself an as-yet undetermined period of time away from it.

[Rusco]

I have kinda similar thing. We haven't had a TV since it it was digitalised 8 years ago. I and my wife chose to get along without it, although we can always watch it from the net if we want to. Since that I've found I'm more softie you know to all the horrible news. At times I can't watch even silly tv series (Midsomer, Wallander) because there are those murders all the time. When I was at my twenties and younger I was really much into all those zombie and horror films. But last autumn when the alternative video of Angry Planet was released I immediately thought that's not for me.

Yea, it's really sad what's happening around the planet Earth right now. Strange and scary times.

[Master Ray]

Religion... nothing has ever caused more pain and suffering on this little bauble we call 'Planet Earth', has it?

 

[Anna Woman von NRW]

What everyone says is true enough.

But

The media, bar the odd token story, only gives us the Black, not the White. Good news does not sell. You really have to look to find the good news. Thing is for every bad shit story there's an opposite good shit story but we won't hear it.

Don't get me wrong, I ain't no ******* hippy and I don't mean everything is a bed of roses. It ain't  - as far as I can see we're heading to hell in  a handcart fast the way we're carrying on but it is all just part of the overall picture.

It's easy to forget that.

 

[Pol]

What i hate about the news is the way it all washes over your head. The way that you seem to become immune to it all protected in your little bubble of daily life. I suppose if you were to really stop and think and try and take it the reality of it all, it would be impossible to function

[Bunny]

World events have been as they are since time began imho. Think of any decade since records began and there has been war, death and famine somewhere. Its just more accessible. If you shut news out of your life, guess what. You feel less negative about the world and life rolls on. I dont really watch tv, occasionally read a paper after years of not doing so.
I have a conspiracy theory that it suits the powers that be to keep us living in fear, as it covers up a lot of social/global inequalities and is a way of controlling a population by fear.

This week in the uk, we are apparently at imminent threat of war with Russia as most of the 1980's were. Fear and paranoia. I'm fairly confident that Russia if it were to invade anywhere, wouldnt be a little island miles from its borders first.

[Amandistan]

It makes me want to help the people who are being harmed and oppressed. Yet there is nothing myself and the majority of people can do about it. That's the hardest part. You see this news footage, cry,want to change the situation. But there is nothing at all that you can do. That's the worst part. It's the same with the Ebola situation.

I know a lot of people must feel the same.
Yes, religion is responsible for a lot of things but then there are peaceful religious people who do no harm at all. In fact some religious organizations do a lot of humanitarian work. It's the fact that people take an ancient book word for word.

Anyone who would do humanitarian work could be captured a killed. This is a group who is funded by taking people hostage and getting money from it.
I have always been interested in current affairs but this is too much. I know it's been like this for thousands of years but you would think that we are civilized and evolved enough to stop by now. 

[ldopas]

Jeez you lot are pessimists. Come on cheer up a bit! 

Look, the news is just a tiny tip of the iceberg. I don't, like Anna (no offence), believe the world is going down the toilet. If you watch the news and believe that is all there is going on then you might think that. But my experience is pretty positive, I have downs like anyone, but I choose to be optimistic. Not always easy I know. Life is a choice, so is emotion. Psychologists call it state change, and most of us who do not suffer clinical depression can choose to be positive or not!

I find life in the main is great. People are vastly kind, assholes are a minority.

Lets look at the news shall we. Did you know the ratio of death by terrorist in the UK, is 1 in 16 million.......1 in 16 million!!!!!!

Chance of a car accident mostly very minor; 1 in 6,800. Chance of dying on a motorcycle; 20 in 100 million road miles. Plane crash 11 million to 1.

In the case of happiness, Fowler and Christakis found that each happy contact increases a person's odds of happiness by an average of 9%, while an unhappy contact decreases those odds by 7%.

Don't forget we are all "pebbles in a pond" (I didn't say that), what you project ripples out and comes back to you. So it's not easy, we are natural cynics in the UK, but l think we have many more positives than negatives by a massive distance. If you just look at the news and politics, you will miss the mass of them that are right in front of you.

BTW I am in engineering construction, not a hippy in case you were thinking that!   

[Rusco]

Jeez you lot are pessimists. Come on cheer up a bit! 

Should we have a look at Sweden? They feel like happy and optimistic most of time.

Now what's that fluke that carry on them? 

[Anna Woman von NRW]

Ding Dong, Happy Days - Idopas is around! Hello mate 

To be clear the reason I think we're off to Hell is not because of any army of murdering fanatical nut-nuts who just happen to be more barbaric than we've seen for a while. Google how many days peace there has there been in the world since WWII. War conflict and violence is a integral part of human life whether we like it or not. And where we are now is nothing compared to the scale and spread of what's gone before.  For me, we're on that particular Highway because we are exhausting every single Resource that our way of life depends on. No great biggie either, civilisations rise and fall throughout history (read Canticle For Leibowitz - Walter M Miller JR for a cool read on that theme).

But back to the stuff about news.....

Read those stats Idopas chucked in - the chances of any of this shit happening to us as individuals is so remote as to be to not worth worrying about. But you'd never believe that just going on the media agenda. Think of it this way - an explosion occurred killing 0.000000000000000000000000000000001% of the worlds population and affecting a few more, in some place you've never heard of because somebody lost the plot and went all Beserker. Or - Fundamentalist Religious Terrorist Suicide Bomber attack. Which version is scarier. Same story.

People have always followed their beliefs to war and causes - the crusades, Spanish civil war, whatever. They always have, always will - get used to it 

Try this - next time some bad shit happens somewhere, do your own fact finding. Google wherever it is and take your own truth about it. I start with Wikipedia to get an overview and go from there - blogs, local news, public social media, all sorts of stuff comes up. Have a shifty through that and you'll get a totally different picture to what you read about in The Guardian. If you've got good broadband it'll take no more than 10 minutes.

What we hear daily  is just the dramatic highlights kinda like a "Best of Series Compilation" . It's one part of the Wheel Of Life not all of it. See, I'm a bit hippy 

Wordy nonsense over.
 

[Bunny]

Atmosphere-Russ Abbott. I defy anyone to feel glum just at the memory of it 

[Amandistan]

I think it's true that there are not many traffic accidents in the U.K. but in the U.S. several people die each day due to car accidents. I have seen several where the cars were just in pieces. My cousin dies in one and I know of many others who have. Oh and there were just 12 people targeted in Paris. That's only a  2 hour eurostar  trip away from London. 

Maybe the U.K. is in good condition but in other nations things are not so great. These are people too just like all of us. The kids in Gaza  have grown up hearing bombs blasts since birth. It is the norm and no kid should have to grow up that way.  Never.   I wish I could just take everyone of them away from there.  It breaks my heart.
  Genocide is being committed by ISIS as we speak.
Women in some of these countries are not allowed to be themselves, They are not seen as equal human beings. Homosexuals are stoned to death simply for being themselves. Even in parts of Europe, It's not okay.

Sorry to disagree but the U.K. is a tiny nation in a massive world. The human beings there are not any better than the people of any other nation. In fact, many people on this forum are not even from there.

I do not have clinical depression yet can not control my emotions.I also seem to be very sensitive of the pain I see on the news. I can feel it very deeply and it drains me. Thereofore can not be happy knowing of what these poeple suffer.

Oh and I will admit to being the modern day equivlent of a hippy.

[Shush]

In the UK there are on average five road deaths per day, I think that is enough to be a problem. While we may not be subjected to bombs on a daily basis, we have had to live with the ever expected regularity of terrorist bombs here in the UK since the end of the war.

[Anna Woman von NRW]

Sometimes the good news is there staring us in the face. It all depends on angle of vision I suppose.

From the front page of todays Guardian website:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/04/road-reconciliation-ex-ira-members-british-soldiers-face-to-face