Every week, the feedback for my column inevitably chides me for my seemingly endless pessimism and negativity.
?”Why don’t you be more positive?” people always ask. “So far, you’ve bitched about Valentine’s Day, the Olympics, the NCAA tournament – what next? Don’t you ever have anything nice to say?”
As a matter of fact, I do; I’m not really an evil feminazi bitch – I promise. Just to prove it to you, here are some things that I actually – gasp! – enjoy: playing on the swings at the playground, student radio, daylight savings, used bookstores, the zoo, Picnic Point at night, the Sunday New York Times and walking around on the lake in the wintertime. I honestly love being a student at UW, and most mornings I wake up and can’t think of anywhere else in the world I’d rather be.
However, I think the media can do a lot more good by pointing out what’s wrong with society or by being a voice for people who have no voice, then by simply patting good citizens on the back. Although it’s always nice to give praise and recognition when due, a newspaper’s primary purpose is not to hand out gold stars to do-gooders.
If you’re honest with yourself, it’s easy to see the world isn’t always a pretty and pleasant place. Obviously, no one enjoys opening the newspaper each morning to headlines bemoaning rising death tolls in the Middle East, but that’s reality and you have no right to ignore it or to pretend otherwise.
Granted, Valentine’s Day and the NCAA tournament aren’t on the same level of importance as the looming war in Israel, but that’s not the point – the point is that it isn’t right to just turn a blind eye to the problems around you and pretend everything is OK when it clearly isn’t.
People sometimes affect entitlement attitudes, and act like it should be the media’s duty to make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Such people want newspapers to sell them escapism or a false sense of security and comfort. They want the media to provide them not with reality, but with heartwarming human-interest stories about firefighters rescuing kittens.
Such people act like it’s the media’s fault that crime, violence and war are even problems – as if such negative things would simply cease to exist if reporters stopped covering them. I guess the old adage is true – out of sight, out of mind.
This is a ridiculous attitude – newspapers do not exist simply so people have something agreeable and ego affirming to read over their morning coffee. Newspapers should reflect reality, not some escapist, utopian vision of what reality could be like in a perfect world.
People need to face the fact that the world is often uncomfortable and unpleasant; just because war and famine aren’t clamoring on your front doorstep doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Of course, this isn’t only true for newspapers and the rest of the media. Look around – pretty much everyone is trying to hide from reality in one way or another. We’ve got school, work, our friends and a million other diversions and excuses to not think – after all, it’s always much easier to be busy than to be authentic.
Drugs, drinking, money, friends – anything to avoid really having to face yourself or answer difficult questions about the point of it all. Think about it for a minute. When was the last time you sat down and questioned the ultimate purpose of your life and whether or not you really, truly enjoy it?
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be allowed to take genuine pleasure in small things – I enjoy basking in the sun on the Terrace, spontaneous snowball fights and the excellent feeling you get after finishing your last final of the semester just as much as the next person. All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t allow complacency or the banality of day-to-day life to become your entire life in and of themselves. In other words, don’t trick yourself into believing that sunny days on the Terrace are the meaning of life in and of themselves.
If you never challenge what you believe and figure out why you believe it, you can never really be happy or at peace. Sure, you may be able to fill your life up with enough baubles to lull yourself into a superficial sense of contentedness, but is that really satisfying and fulfilling in the end?
I’d counter that the only way to find true happiness and serenity is to break free from your comfort zone and go after the truth. Taking the first step and admitting you don’t really know anything is difficult and leaves you vulnerable, but it’s the only way to ever attain anything actually worth having.
So maybe my detractors are right; maybe I really am spoilsport pessimist – but I’d take the authenticity of my negativity over someone else’s mechanical comfort any day.
Kristin Wieben ([email protected]) is a sophomore majoring in political science and French. She promises she will write something positive next week.
