So often the morning news is terrible, terrible. A young son is killed by a stray bullet in the street. Drone attacks in Yemen are “successful,” and while an ISIS leader is killed, so are his family of five children and wife; there are photos of their grieving relatives. Then I dwell on the new president, plagued by thoughts I’d just rather not have. I feel sadness seeing lost lives, and I feel anger at news from Alabama of a man released from prison after being wrongly accused and convicted of rape twenty years ago. On the last page, there is an editorial by an ER doctor from Philadelphia on how to tell a mother that her son has been murdered, and there’s a story of how an Israeli surgeon arranged to have a little Afghan girl transferred to Tel Aviv so she could undergo lifesaving heart surgery.
What’s the hardest part of reading the news? Whether it’s on your iPad or in print, a paper delivered to your door earlier this morning, the hardest part is often the ads, and the placement of one sad article next to a happy one. You ask yourself, how can I read this story of the family in Yemen next to an ad for a BMW? Worse yet is an ad for a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park in the midst of a story of the remaining tent cities in Port au Prince.
