City Of God 31

It's hard to stay positive about the world when you listen to the news a lot. The radio stations and other news outlets aren't interested in telling us everything that's going on in the world, only the bad stuff, or mostly anyway, since that is what gets our attention, and it also keeps us warned and on the alert. I just wonder if that is healthy in the kinds of mega-doses that we end up feeding ourselves. I am not thinking here of so-called "fake news." I don't think that any of it's fake. Neither are we given the whole picture. We can see videos and hear news reports, for example, of crime and murder and narcotrafficking in Mexico, and I have heard a lot of people say they would never go there. Who have never been there and would rather listen to the news than go there and see for themselves. But who wants their all-inclusive fun in the sun holiday ruined by getting shot or kidnapped. I have been to Mexico City five times, as well as to Puebla and Chiapas, and the worst thing that happened to me was a teenage boy in the zoo (they really should have fed him to the leopards), demanding that I give him my wallet. He was wearing his school uniform, along with his friends, and I assumed that the little brats had skipped classes for the day. He might have been all of sixteen. I scolded him for trying to rob a visitor, and really, my wallet was safe in my hotel safe where it belonged, but he accepted my rebuke then left me alone. Otherwise, I always found Mexico, and the people I encountered there to be warm, friendly, inviting and but for the problems with water and traffic, very enjoyable. My experiences in Colombia have been similarly positive (and there you can drink the tap water), but for a couple of close calls with criminals posing as police who wanted to rob me, but I did manage to get away. Still, after two stays of a month each in Bogota, not bad, considering all the scary news stories. I could go on, but I won't. We live in a world where awful things happen, where people do horrible things to each other. There are also a lot of acts of kindness and benevolence and for the most part, everyone is just getting on with their lives, but you rarely read about that in the news. Even though my own downtown neighbourhood is kind of sad and ugly, and at times unsafe, it isn't horrible. I can still come and go without getting shot at, and I always have a reasonable certainty that I will get home alive. I suspect that there is a huge problem with the Internet, and our social isolation. The horrible person who shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh the other day, resulting in eleven deaths had been posting anti-Semitic hate drivel on social media for years. And no one caught him? Freedom of speech is not a cover for spreading hate. And a likely Trump supporter, like that other loser in Florida who was sending bombs to ex-presidents and other democrats and other, shall I say, people who speak critically of his dear president. We also have the world's worst president in US history rising in popularity (forty-seven percent now, after, a few months of hovering at around forty), and Balsonero, the Trump of the tropics being elected as president of Brazil. It is troubling that so many people would vote for those idiots, not knowing or caring about the consequences. It is safe to say that the vast majority of their supporters are themselves poorly educated, and this for me begs the question of how inaccessible higher education is to people on low incomes. With both those arrogant blowhards in power the world is not going to be a safer place, especially with the new P. of Brazil "promising" to develop the Amazon, trample over the human rights of the indigenous people who live there, and make the world all the less safe for climate change and global warming. It can make you want to not get out of bed, but get out of bed we must, and hear those awful things we must, and rise above our fears and talk and network and take care of one another and take care of the outsiders and strangers we must, because we do not need only more fear and ignorance, not if we want to work for something better in the world.