The World is Ending?

The world is ending!
The world is ending!
Everything is downward trending.
Governments are overspending.
Great disaster coming soon -
Blizzard, earthquake, flood, typhoon.
Enemies and monsters loom.
Prepare for our impending doom. 

What do we do?
What do we do?
It's terrible,
Just read the news.
Crime and scandal,
Social issues,
All the adults will shake in their shoes.
Plastic swords up,
At the ready.
Fill the water guns.
Hold 'em steady.
Barricade ourselves with pillows.
Curl in a ball like armadillos. 

The world is ending!
The world is ending!
Hackers hacking,
Malware sending,
Viruses and memes descending,
Even computers need defending.
Solar flares and comets crashing,
Earth is bound to take a bashing.
All the glaciers melting, cracking.
Angry polar bears attacking. 

What do we do?
What do we do?
Hide the pets and piggy bank too.
Let's give in to world's-end blues.
Or maybe,
Read a bit less news.

-B.C. Byron
The news is bleak. Put on your battle armor and build a fence to keep the hackers out of your computer.
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Something I’ve come to realize about news is that it makes money by pushing strong emotions. Fear is a strong emotion that glues ears to a radio and eyes to a screen, leaving us hanging on every sentence and driving our mouse fingers to click and click for more. Anger is another strong emotion the news uses to pull us in. With more and more news reporting websites coming online everyday, reporting gets more and more fearful and angry it seems. Unfortunately, happy and positive feelings get less clicks and don’t seem to get humans all fired up, even though these emotions can easily be just as powerful inside us.

It’s important to stay informed about the world around us, but too much negative news fills us with dread and has us wanting to hide behind our pillows like the kid in this poem. If it starts to feel like the world is ending, take a break from social media and screens. Also, it helps to put things in perspective with some numbers. If the news says there were 10 robberies in your state today, that means there were millions of homes where robberies didn’t happen. The reporters didn’t think you’d find that interesting but it sure gives peace to the mind to think about all the places and people that aren’t experiencing disaster. Even better would be to shift your focus to how you can help that unfortunate small number of people that were affected by something bad. The world is filled to the brim with good happenings all the time. The world also has a scattering of opportunities to help others – all the time.

Turn off the news today, write down a list of good things you saw this week, then go out and experience the good things for yourself. Despite what screens are telling us there is a ton of good to see, and it’s way more interesting than gloomy doomsayers.

Wishing Well

A dollar in the wishing well
To make your dreams come true.
You must've wished that I'd be rich.
I'll take more coins,
Thank YOU!

-B.C. Byron
Come on, admit it. How many times have you wished you were this guy as you looked at all the coins in the wishing well?
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I’ve never really understood wishing wells. Why do so many humans have the impulse to chuck money in water? The most bizarre thing about them is that a good number of people wish for money as they toss their hard-earned coins in. Even if they didn’t wish for money, it’s a high probability that the thing they wished for could be bought with money. Maybe they should be wishing for self-restraint or a book about fiscal responsibility instead. Maybe they could just jump in and take the pile of money in the bottom and go wish shopping today. I don’t get it.

It’s not just wells and fountains that feed on this money-tossing impulse, either. My sister had a tree stump in front of her house that shared the same street as the local grade school. The prior owner, or some other enterprising fellow, had drilled quarter sized holes into the stump and filled one of them with a shiny new quarter – a “seed” so passers-by would get the idea. When my sister moved in, they found a pleasant surprise every couple of days as school kids pushed coins into the old tree on their way home. Her kids got a few of their wishes fulfilled after some prying with tools, but I don’t think the other kids got much out of the deal. This made me wonder how far people might go with the wishing well idea. If, instead of a candy jar, I put a jar full of dollars on my desk at work and wrote the words “wishing jar” on it, will I be able to get my coworkers to part with their bucks? Maybe I can modernize the idea and make a “wishing slider” where people can slide a credit card and record their wants into a microphone. On the screen, users will find a “how bad do you want this wish” meter which they can slide to the right to indicate how much the machine will charge. You laugh, but an old stump with quarters worked fine. Why not a wish slider? I’d better go patent this idea.

A side note: Many wishing wells are actually used to collect donations for charities, which is actually pretty cool of them. So check with the wishing well owner before getting that snorkel and going coin diving.