Monday, February 16, 2009

fear and worry. no thanks.

I was so looking forward to today.  All weekend long the forecasters in southern california prepared us for the storm of the century, or at least the year.   A day in Los Angeles where the weather impedes your life, doesn't happen very often.  And what a better day to have that happen. Presidents day.  A day off.  50 degrees. Raining. A roaring fire.  What could be better? 

I watched people on the news sandbag their store fronts on Ventura boulevard fearing the worst. I watched newscasters who stretched from the beaches of Ventura to the mountains of San Bernadino broadcasting what might happen. rain. snow.  flooding.  the worst.   I watched an overly tan weather man tell me how bad things were going to be and to expect no less than four inches of rain in twenty four to forty eight hours.  I watched and prepared and anticipated the worst.  I was so caught up in the weather that my husband and I went to the grocery store to load up on groceries in case we couldn't make it out of our house for two days.  We bought into it.  The fear.  The worry.  The what ifs.  I was morbidly into it.  Excited by the challenge of bad weather, of weather at all.   

And while it did rain through most of the night and a little drizzle in the morning, by 1:00 in the afternoon the sun was muscling its way through the gray sky and blue sky won.  And by 4:00 there wasn't a cloud in the sky.  

How does that happen?  Two things come to mind. weather men are not supposed to be good at their jobs.  There is no other job in the world where you can be wrong time and time again, put people through hell, because of what you are telling them and be asked back to work the next day to possibly do it all over again.  I understand we live in Los Angeles and weather is hard to come by here, but for god's sake, how do you predict the storm of the century and the sun shines for half the day.  

Then it dawned on me.  We put a lot of faith in our news people, and what they are telling us, for the most part,  is be afraid. Be very afraid.  I don't think that they are blowing smoke up our ass about the economy, however, I do think there has been a fear mongering technique that has been happening for quite some time.  I for one am very afraid.  And I am turning it off tomorrow. No more news.  

Fear and worry. No thanks.  whether it's the weather or how the economic system as we know it, is crumbling into a million little pieces,  i am not buying into it. rather I will tune my radio into a different frequency one with a larger bandwidth that has room for all of life's cumulus clouds, lightning strikes and sunny days, but like the weather man's prediction, there's no way to predict.  You just prepare for whatever may come the best you can.  


2 comments:

  1. There are 2 typos on the events listing: March is misspelled twice. :-) I noticed when sharing the dates with my Dallas Network.

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  2. yes, yes, and yes, andrea. turning it off is key. choosing to see what you know to be real in your heart...a great step away from manufactured fear (remember fear is quite addictive, and the more addicted you are, the more the networks can sell your eyes to their advertisers...). you know, being the change. your voice has power.

    you might find this hard to believe, but after almost 10 years of making TV, i now live in a world without TV in my home (i still watch a lot of movies and sometimes will rent a full season of an awesome TV series like "weeds" or "jon from cincinatti"...but those eyeball sellers are out of my life!)

    congrats on what looks like an awesome book! and i love your blog! (it's me...sara tekula.)

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