All the News that's Disturbing Enough to Print

I don't often engage in the "What is the world coming to?" dialogue.  As a Pastor, I often have people try to bring me along for that ride, but I just don't find it particularly edifying, so I usually just mumble vague assent that indeed the latest "turn for the worse" really is shocking/horrifying/destestable, etc. etc. etc.
I'm not being dishonest.  The news really is undoubtedly grim.  There are really terrible things that happen each and every day.  Case in point: three women, abducted as teens and young adults, held captive by three men for almost ten years.  Ten years in which horrific, unthinkable things probably happened to them while they were mere yards away from neighbors who were going about their daily lives with no knowledge that those three young ladies were having nearly a decade of their lives brutally stolen from them.
Case in point: a teenager punches a soccer referee in the head for showing him a yellow card.  The referee was a 40-something father who was just trying to help out with rec-league soccer, he collapsed, went into a coma and died a week later... Because some hothead thought a game was more important than the most basic rules of civilization.
Case in point: some twisted guy up in Massachusetts, had plans to kidnap, rape and eat (that's right, cannibalize) children in a fully equipped dungeon in the basement of his suburban home.
Those are just things I saw today, headlined on my phone and stories on the TV news having lunch at Joe's house of noodles.

I would tell you that these sorts of events are harbingers of the doom of our civilization...
I would tell you that these sorts of things should cause you to lose faith in humanity...

But I'm not going to tell you any such thing.
Reality check: these sorts of terrible things have been happening for a very long time.  Seriously, read Exodus and Leviticus sometime, all those laws in there were made because someone had gone off the rails, and the leaders of God's chosen people felt they needed to clarify.  There are laws about how much you're allowed to beat your slaves and who and what you're allowed to have sex with, there are lots of laws about what to eat and how you should respond to someone who has a sore on their face.  There was a lot of time spent, putting a bit of a finer point on the broad precepts of the law, because apparently the people needed that to happen.
I'm not the first one to observe that the very way our news is reported tends to skew our perception of reality towards the macabre.  What gets reported is the horrific, the sensational, the prurient and the ridiculous.  Death, destruction and chaos; enough to fill the 24 hour news cycle.  Watch it long enough and you will surely come to the conclusion that our world has indeed gone to Hell in a bucket.

They don't report that several nurses were caring for elderly patients at the hospital with kindness and good humor.  I had to see that for myself.
They don't report that the waitress at the noodle house tried to understand one of our group's special dietary needs (gluten intolerance) enough to tell her that she would probably be okay to have a bowl of Pho.
They don't report any of the thousand-million nice, decent, ordinary, kind things that people do for one another without even thinking about it, every single day on this salubrious blue-green orb.
Even with all the malice and badness that goes on under the sun, the goodness could bury it in a second, but it very rarely gets on the news other than in the occasional puff-piece. In fact, the very term puff-piece belies our attitude about the good in the world: it doesn't matter.  The "real" news is the horror, the tragedy, and the trauma.  What we "need" to hear about are the sick, twisted and perverted, not the good, generous and kind.

I don't expect that the news is going to change very much.
So that leaves it on our shoulders.
We must be safe, but not afraid.
We must be vigilant, but not paranoid.
We must learn to work for the good, and not accept the bad as the status quo, because it's not.
The only way that is going to work is for us to see clearly that in the battle between good and evil: good is winning by an overwhelming margin, or we wouldn't be here.  Ghandi once said about loosing faith in humanity because of the evil of a few, "A few drops of filthy water does not make the ocean unclean, humanity is an ocean."
Today, or any day, when you are faced with what seems like a lot of filth and muck, just work on making your drop, as full of goodness, kindness, justice, mercy and love as you can.