There was a man living in a small town in Tennessee who planted a large garden every year. After the vegetables had ripened, he would call all of his meighbors and invite them to help themselves to anything in his garden--without any charge! While the neighbors enjoyed this bounty, the man was overheard saying that it was he, in fact, who received the most pleasure for giving the vegetables to his friends.
Do you think this story would be printed in THE NEW YORK TIMES or USA TODAY or the WALLSTREET JOURNAL? Do you think that CBS, NBC, ABC or CNN would consider this a worthy story for their nightly news? Of course not! Why not? You and I know the answer. No one got raped, shot, burned, cut, stabbed, poisoned, drugged, divorced, cheated, murdered, lied to, stolen from--you get the picture!
American society, throught the news media, is fed a daily diet of human degradation. Little wonder that crime is on the rise and people are afraid to leave their homes at night. A trip to your local bank or convenience store could kill you.
This bombardment of negative human behavior keeps us in a gridlock of fear, anxiety, and near societal depression. Our governments, local and federal, react by calling for more money, more police, and other methods of handling social conflict. More people are buying guns and taking self-defense courses than at any other time in history. Personal stress is at an all-time high. Almost every week there is a report of another worker who "cracks" and kills his boss or co-workers. Billions upon billions of dollars are spent each year on prisons, police, FBI, ATF, CIA, courts, prosecutors, judges, and lawyers to deal with our social ills.
Not only does the media inform us about conflict, but it is also recycled in weekly presentations on television. Sometimes even before a conflict is ended, movies such as The Waco, Texas Standoff are being prepared. This constant feeding frenzy of conflict is one of the causes of the social cancer that perpetuates itself in the name of "news". The media tell us that they report "what happens out there on the fruited plain. We give the people what they want."
The news media, especially television, have appointed themselves the "information gods" of society. They tell us what kind, how much, when, where, and how it all happened--according to their selection standards. American society rarely questions the modus operandi of news orginazations. They deliver and we accept.
For years, social scientists have questioned the problems of society. SURVIVAL NEWS takes the position that we who make up society are not totally unlike computers. The type of information taht is fed into a computer will dictate its output. Our minds have been peppered with too much conflict information. The more conflict we absorb, the more conflict we will produce. In some ways, it is amazing that there is not more social chaos than exists today.
Although the computer analogy is simplistic, it nevertheless expresses the basic problem as we see it. Our solutin, to some, may seem even more simplistic: let's spread some good news and see if that will help. By good news we mean stories like the Tennessee man distributing free vegetables--all the positive stories we can find! Topics for the stories that we want to print include the following:
We define good news as "any situation where one human being is helping another."
The basic goal of SURVIVAL NEWS is to collect and disseminate good news to as many people as possible. Our collection process will be from all sources, not only through wire services but also from average people who observe the kind of behavior that we have described.
In our fist edition, we offer several stories that will give you an idea of the kind of good news we will print.
SURVIVAL NEWS will begin as a monthly publication and will be supported financially by sales of the paper and donations. Beyond the financial support we hope to receive from our readers, we also want you to participate by helping us find stories that are happening in your community so we can report them in our paper.
Albert Schweitzer said, "The greatest discovery of any generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind." Our preliminary research indicates that there are many people in our society who would like to see a change in attitude. More importantly, they want to participate in bringing about positive change.
While we do not expect SURVIVAL NEWS to be a panacea for all the ills of our world, we believe it is a positive beginning. If you belive that good news can help your family, neighborhood, community, state, nation, and world, please help us by sending a story or donation or by purchasing our paper for one year. In any case, we want to hear from you. Write or send a facsimile to us and we will respond.