For When the News Could Crush Your Spirit
One snowy evening, I was cutting sweet potatoes and listening to a newsy podcast. The headlines were heavy with humanity at its worst. As the two hosts talked about a horrendous event, the first host said, I guess there was a guy who risked his life to tackle one of the attackers.
The second host replied, Good for him.
Then they spent the rest of the segment on the grim details and implications of the attack.
Stories of violence and cruelty must be told. We must reckon with the worst of who we can be to each other. And we must learn from these acts of brutality.
But if our learning is that the world is burning and humanity is mostly arsonists, I’d offer that there is another truth asking to be known.
In four words, Mr. Rogers’ mother told him how to find comfort when the news is scary: Look for the helpers.
And there’s a key word in that sentence: look.
These helpers are written about in smaller font or never reported on at all. But I’d bet the bank that when horror arrives, there are many more people quietly and with little acclaim mending wounds, not creating them. Grabbing people to ferry them to safety, using their own body as a shield, holding hands, rubbing backs, whispering that it’ll be ok, even if they don’t know it to be true.
It is, I suspect, the great majority of people who meet terror with love. Which is to say that humanity is made up of many more people who care for each other rather than destroy each other.
Once, on a gray day in Northern Ireland, I heard a man say that we shouldn't take peace for granted because it’s quieter than violence.
The same could be said for kindness, gentleness, generosity. They don’t magnetize our attention like cruelty or violence. Perhaps because they aren’t as threatening.
But overlooking what is redemptive about humanity can be threatening to us in a different way.
"I know the world is bruised and bleeding,” wrote Toni Morrison, "and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence.”
Herein lies an archetypal challenge: can we look with clear eyes at humanity’s cruelty and care without letting the reality of the former override the truth of the latter.
If we give our attention to the horror, at the exclusion of all else, we can be consumed by fear, which armors itself in cynicism, which suffocates action. What’s the point of trying to change anything? We’re too far gone.
And the conditions for people to do bad things remain.
In other words, overlooking humanity’s redemption threatens our ability to build a different world.
There is a lot of good policy change waiting to happen. The kind that decreases violence and “increase[s] the durability and the occasions of love among and between peoples” as poet June Jordan wrote.
To get that policy moving down the legislative tracks, it takes many, many people believing in and reaching for a different world. “Hope,” as David Orr wrote, “is a verb with its sleeves rolled up.”
The news may rock us, rattle us, scare, and dismay us. The trick, I think, is to not let it harden us.
So I try to train my attention on the helpers, the healers, the unsung saints who walk among us. And magnificently, they are everywhere.