Where's the Good News?

I've given up watching local news and I'm about ready to give up on reading local news online. It doesn't take more than a perusal of a paragraph or two of a news story or sometimes just a headline or two to turn me off. Ok, call me an isolationist but I just can't handle what I hear and read. It frightens me -- and makes me worry about not just myself but others.

I live in Arizona. 'nuff said. Cut education but not law enforcement. Cut Medicaid and the medical safety net for the poor but not raise taxes for the rich and big business. Cut support for Planned Parenthood but don't support things that benefit the already-born (like education, health care, food subsidies for poor families, etc). Support carrying concealed guns (in bars, on the street, and now even talk of allowing them on campus) even though that got 6 people killed and 13, including a member of the legislture, injured. Have I given you a picture of how I see our legislature? It's no different nationally. I hear about lots of cuts to programs I might need or use and certainly many of my neighbors could as well, but I don't hear a d***** thing about legislators cutting their own salaries or benefits. I'm betting they'll find a way to increase them, if given half a chance. It'll just be buried so deep it will take dynamite to dig it out of the verbiage of the multitudinous bills passing through the various houses. Oh, and I can bet certain pet projects that will benefit the rich and the powerful will never be touched. Talk about sacred cows....

This morning I consider Jesus's words, "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. " (Luke 12:22b-23) Dang. He sure doesn't make things easy, does he?

There are so many in-your-face problems these days to worry about: foreclosures, cuts in programs I and others depend on, rising prices for necessities with more and more chance of cutbacks or layoffs in the work environment, more and more fear that something's going to go catastrophically wrong (which, as I age, is becoming more and more probable) and there will be no safety net to catch me or even break the fall. Then I read where Jesus tells me not to worry about things. Oy vey.

Sr. Joan Chittister remarked, "It's not the grappling with a thing that defeats us; it is the unknown answers to the hidden questions that wear us down."* I know what it feels like to be paralyzed by fear, unable to think even past the next breath. I've learned the hard way to concentrate on the next thing, not ten things down the road. In short, don't worry about more than the immediate until I am able to breathe freely and focus on the bigger picture. But when I can focus, I need to look beyond the just me and how stuff like the shennanigans in the legislature affect me to how they will affect people around me, people who don't have the resources I do or even the experiences I do. I need to be their advocate instead of just sitting like a lump and trying to keep myself out of trouble.

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* Chittister, Joan D., Scarred By Struggle, Transformed By Hope. (paperback ed. 2005) Grand Rapids MI: William B Eeerdmans Publishing Co. (46).