Brother, can you spare some good news?

A cartoon from about.com by Walt Handelsman.

I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I think I’m going to have to stay away from the news.

As a former journalist, it seems unthinkable. I have two newspapers delivered, and I read most of them before I leave the house. My computer’s homepage is the Los Angeles Times. I listen to NPR on the way to work. My husband usually watches ABC news in the evening.

I have lots of intelligent Facebook friends who post links to news stories. I have a smartphone that gives me news. In other words, the news is fairly inescapable in my life.

But lately, I’ve been experiencing an existential angst I first felt in the early 1970s when the United States started going into an economic downturn. People were wringing their hands about the cost of bread rising to more than a dollar. Try five dollars, now.

I spend two days of my week teaching a composition class modeled on a sustainability theme: the loss of biodiversity, how Monsanto has patented life and is gobbling up all the seed strains so they can genetically engineer them; how the World Bank owns the rights to most of the fresh water on the planet; the melting polar ice caps; the whirling vortex of trash the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean; the dying oceans, etc.

It isn’t all doom and gloom — there are bright spots where people are changing paradigms and making things better — but their efforts seem like spitting into the ocean.

Also, media is sounding the near-constant drumbeat of bad economic news: every day we hear some new pronouncement about we definitely are/might be/ are already, but we don’t know it/ in a recession.

I think investors are the ones who should stop reading the news. Every month another jobs report comes out to tell us what we already know: it doesn’t seem that things are getting any better. And every month investors send the stock market reeling on this little gem of wisdom.

It seems purposeless. Why don’t they just let it ride a few months and see what happens? By the time the report comes out, it’s old news anyway.

My ophthalmologist told me years ago that his doctor prescribed a cure for his skyrocketing blood pressure and anxiety: stop reading or listening to the news. And that was when we didn’t have the 24-hour newscycle, thanks to the Internet.

I didn’t tell him, but I was appalled. I think I murmured something like, “Oh, I could never do that,” but really I was wondering how any intelligent person could hide his or her head in the sand and pretend like everything was “Hunky Dunky!” to quote actor S.K. “Cuddles” Sakall.

But now I’m beginning to get it.

Like many Americans, my husband and I are living paycheck to paycheck, with next to no safety-net. But we’ve got a warm bed, cars that run, families who love us, food to eat, clothes to wear, work that matters, and books to read (even if we need to go to the library every once in a while).

I own no stock, and don’t have the opportunity to “wet myself” (my husband’s expression) every time some new bit of bad economic news comes out, so why should I even listen to it?

I’ve heard some older rural people talk about how they went through the Great Depression not knowing they were poor, because they were just like everyone else. If no one around you has the latest electronic gadget or gizmo, how can you feel left behind?

I like being in the know, and being the go-to person for my family on the latest trend or news, but not at the risk of upping my dose of anti-depressants. I’m not sure how one can continue to be a good citizen and participate in the democratic process without knowing what’s going on, but I’d like to try. Lord knows tens of thousands of ignorant people vote every election.

That brings up another point — many of the problems we have now are a result of people choosing to not hear the news, or conveniently looking the other way. Experts have been telling us for years that Americans weren’t saving enough, we carried too much debt, we were ruining our environment, and we continued to ignore them, and kick the can down the street.

Now we are at the end of the street, and the cans are piling up. So clearly, total avoidance of current events isn’t ideal either.

Maybe I’ll start small, and listen to audio-books on my way to work instead of NPR. That way I’ll start the day on an even keel before I start depressing my students about the state of the environment.