Trust

Maybe it's my old age talking, but I'm increasingly convinced that the more technologically aware we become, the more we are convinced that evil and trouble are lurking just around the corner. That the world is now small is an illusion of such staggering proportion that we seem to be forgetting the value of trust and faith in humanity in the communities we actually belong to. That we have begun to ascribe the sum total of actions in the global community to the potential action of our local environment is a festering hotbed for paranoia and despair.

Information is a blessing and a curse of exactly equal proportion. The more it benefits us on the one hand, the more it threatens us on the other. In this digital age of 24 hour news programming where the worst terrors of the world are portrayed in the light of being on our front doorstep and leering through the living room window, it's so damn easy to simply assume that our lives are in mortal danger at every moment. And, truth be told, they are in a way.

The complete and utter ruin of your world could be waiting just the other side of sunset. Or not. So it's always been, and so it will always be, but it seems everyone in this modern age is so much more keenly aware of death's breathy whisper on the napes of our necks that we exert that much more effort in staving it off and in turn lose increasing faith in those who share our world.

Distrust is such an easy and alluring reaction, and a natural one for anyone who spends time reading CNN. The volume of bad news we can ingest is bad enough, but that we have active participants scouring the globe to find us the worst of the worst for our current events pleasure will unfailingly shake any sane person's faith in humanity. When we perceive the world as being small, the fate that befalls some unfortunate child in Kansas or California or Kuala Lampur seems like it's taking place right in our backyards. We lose scope of the size of humanity and its ordinary actions of completely un-newsworthiness in comparison to the barrage of bad news.

The world is so easy to perceive as a permanently bad place, and I encourage you to look away from sensational terror. I feel the tickle of pessimism in me regularly, and it takes an active effort of trust to not assume the person next to me at the grocery store isn't a killer, rapist or music stealer.

In this age of awareness and information, it seems to me that the likelihood of bad things happening has neither risen nor fallen in comparison to more innocent times when the world ended at the city or state line. Our information age has not taught us a way to protect ourselves from the occasionally inevitable, only to live more of our life in fear of it.

And, that's why I don't watch Dateline NBC.