I rarely follow the news. I have no idea what’s going on in the world unless so many people are talking about it, that the bad news enters into my sphere via word-of-mouth. Notice that I specifically said “bad news” because that’s the only news that seems to get airwaves, which is why I lost interest.
99% of the news stories are doom and gloom — war, bombs, crime, exposés, dirty politics, finger pointing, and it just never ends.
Stories about pit bulls attacking kids are all over the internet, but a dog that saves someone’s life, or brings joy into a nursing home, or serves as an early warning sign for cancer — they are just blips on the radar, bogies that disappear so quickly that you forget you even saw them. They don’t get shared like the child who was hospitalized after a dog attack, which spreads across the internet like a virus.
I can name scandals about as fast as I can say the words: Nixon’s Watergate, Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky, Obama’s birth certificate, the Kennedy/Marilyn Monroe connection, the Oliver North scandal, Scooter Libby’s controversial book, televangelist Jim Bakker’s multitude of deviations, and the list goes on.
But good things brought into the world? Wow, you’ve got to dig deep to find these hidden morsels. President Obama will forever be linked to whether he had a valid birth certificate, and the debate over Obamacare, but did you know that he backed a plan to save jaguars from extinction? A region totaling 764,207 acres has been officially designated as a critical habitat for jaguars (Panthera onca) in Arizona and New Mexico.
Our big cats are in trouble… not only jaguars, but lions and especially tigers, and if we don’t take action, they WILL go extinct. Your great-great-grandchildren could grow up in a world without some of these Big Cats — can you live with that? Are humans so important that our desires should override the existence of another species?
President George W. Bush also took a step toward protecting our wildlife when he declared a remote region of the Hawaiian Islands to be a national monument, which preserved 84 million acres as a marine nature reserve to protect 7,000 species of birds, fish, and marine mammals, many of which are only found in that region. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton also took steps to protect Hawaiian wildlife as well.
I didn’t hear any of these stories on the grapevine news. I found them while doing research for unrelated things. The media isn’t interested in covering stories that should be our highest priority, or to bring us good news stories, except as a side item quickly forgotten.
If the media were to redirect their focus to share good news, and focus more on the stories that affect our planet as a whole and not just one small group of people, I honestly believe that human thinking would follow suit and that overall, we humans would navigate in a more positive direction. Words have power, and we should use them wisely.
* * * * *
To learn more about the plight of the Big Cats in a fun, educational way, King of the Forest: An Acre of America Backyard Nature Series takes a light-hearted look at the animals, insects, and plants that live on a single, residential acre. Caterpillars that can shoot a stream of acid and hit a bull’s-eye, insects that carry their own multi-purpose hunting knife, spiders that drift on the wind for miles dangling from silken parachutes, and wasps that smuggle their babies into another wasp’s nursery, all possess tactics that help guarantee the survival of their species. King of the Forest, which is the third book in the Acre of America Backyard Nature Series, highlights not only the wizards of survival that live on our one acre, it takes you deep inside the world of the Big Cats, some of which are already extinct — as in gone forever.
Acre of America
| The Wizard of Awe Kindle Coffee Table Paperback  |
Over the Hummingbird's Rainbow Kindle Coffee Table Paperback  |
King of the Forest Kindle Coffee Table Paperback  |
