Politically, I am conservative……..you probably guessed. As for the major hot button issues: I oppose abortion, support the right to bear arms, and favor freedom over big government. I favor personal responsibility over entitlement. Of the major “news” outlets, Fox, more than any, other caters to my opinions. And yet, I rarely watch Fox. How can that be?
For what it’s worth, if you are a liberal, you can substitute CNN, MSNBC, or many of the other major media outlets. The problem is the same.
If you tune in Fox or CNN or MSNBC, there will be a “talking head” discussing the three or four topics that have him or her outraged today. Stay tuned for 5 hours and he or she will say the same thing over and over 50 different ways.
I can summarize the next 100 hours of broadcast journalism on all of the major networks in one sentence.
There are a lot of bad people doing bad things out there…….all day……every day.
I don’t watch Fox because when I do……I get mad. And that is the whole point. Fox, CNN, and the rest want you mad. They make their living by making you mad. They hope to advance their political agenda by getting you mad and keeping you mad.
Here’s the thing…….I don’t need the media to get mad. I am fully capable of getting mad………all on my own…….completely unsupervised.
And perhaps, that is the other face of the problem. We are all mad and we’re getting madder.
Mad is not what we were built for. God didn’t create Adam and Eve and put them in a garden so that they could fight. He put them there to love each other and to care for each other, and to love him. Instead, what he got was a “cage match” between 8 billion combatants.
Here is my suggestion.
Take the time every day that you spend watching the news……and getting mad…….or maybe scared. Set apart some of that time……maybe half of it……..and read a good book. Choose a book that will take you to the place that you were created for……..a place of love, charity, and, most of all, hope. Do this for a week or so. You couldn’t choose a better book than the Bible. A good place to start would be the book of John.
I bet you’ll feel better. In fact, you won’t just feel better…….you will be better. Because you will have taken a step closer to the place where you were meant to be………the place that you were created for…….and a step away from the “cage match”.
The anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God.
James, 1:20, ESV
But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry…”
Jonah, 4:9, ESV