How We Read the News Says A Lot About Us

With war unfolding in Ukraine, I started thinking about how, as a kid growing up in the eighties, I remember listening to my parents’ stories about bearing witness to so much important news.

Throughout the sixties and seventies, they witnessed all the good stuff: Martin Luther King and the fight for desegregation, César Chávez and the struggle for better treatment for farm workers, the fight for women’s equality, the Stonewall riot and demand for LGBTQ rights.

Hearing those stories, I always thought that perhaps I had been born in the wrong decade. Oh, how I longed to have been born in that era to be a part of such meaningful, extraordinary change. To be a part of living history. As a highly sensitive empath unsure of my place in the more-is-more, winner-take-all, prey-or-predator culture of the eighties (I was always “the loser”), I felt that allying with such meaningful movements would have finally imbued my life with purpose.

Now that the news cycle is permanently set to WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY, thanks to four years of political upheaval, Capitol Insurrections, pandemics, and now “the largest European war since WW2,” I be like: