No more burying my head in the sand..

For a long time I have avoided watching, listening to and reading the news. This is because I feel that the news tends to be very negative, doesn’t generally give a balanced viewpoint of both the good and bad things going on in the world and is often demoralising.  I used to find that the more I heard about upsetting things, the more I wanted to bury my head in the sand and comfort myself with chocolate, tv, wine – things would make me forget about them. 
These days I hardly drink, I gave up chocolate when I gave up sugar and I don’t watch much tv.  I have found that I have had to deal with my emotions far more than ever before. Without these comforting crutches to turn to, I went through periods of worrying about anything and everything.  After a while though I kind of came out the other side.  
I still find bad news upsetting, but I can put it into better perspective and not get demoralised by it.  I now want to hear the news – specifically news about the environment because all the time I was burying my head in the sand, I was:
  • entirely unaware of the scale of the problems caused by using plastic once and then chucking it away
  • oblivious to the full extent of the downsides of filling my wardrobe full of cheap clothes.  
  • only vaguely aware of the reasons why there was such opposition to the incinerator built around 10 miles away from my house
  • not too worried about how much food I was wasting or about chucking in the main bin when I couldn’t be bothered to empty my over flowing compost bin.
  • putting far too much faith in products labelled things like eco, green or organic.
  • certain that bigger, better, more, shiny and newer were ideals to aim for and to be proud of when I achieved them. 
I lived my life slightly blind to the mess and pollution I was causing on a daily basis. I can’t solve all the environmental problems in the world, but I can stop adding to the damage done and take responsibility for my actions.  As painful as it may be to hear that we are each individually as well as collectively making a mess of our world, I have now accepted that the first step to resolving the problem is recognising the problem exists.  So I’m not going to bury my head in the sand any more and have already started to read, listen to and watch the news again (not all the time mind, mainly about environmental issues and I still look for the positive stories to help balance out the negative ones).

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Comments

  1. Anonymous

    We are feed propaganda by all side very little news now .
    Noticed the the british brainwashing corporation didn't run the story about the IMF telling the russian utility company to increase utillity bills by 40%. The company's refused.
    Has it happened in the uk already.
    government says it down to global markets .
    I take a balanced view with news from various sources not just the main stream media.

  2. Zoe

    The lack of balance in the mainstream news is one of the reasons I avoided it, but like you I get my news from a wide variety of sources these days, mainly linked to from my Twitter feed.

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