Perception verses Reality

I wanted to talk about a subject that has bothered me for years. Most people get their sense of how life is going from the news or others they talk to day by day. As we all know, that slant on things is generally extremely negative. The news channels even admit that the only news that sells is bad news.

The general feeling one gets from those sources is everything is going to shit in a hand-basket. The children no longer respect their elders or the laws. They are all into drugs and alcohol and don't care about school or their teachers anymore. Most people would steal you blind if they had the chance. Most people are lazy no good for nothing slackers who don't even know how to work anymore. Our morals are going in the dumps as well.

Did you know that these kinds of sentiments have been said all throughout the ages? Socrates said these things. Hitler based most of his platform to the German masses on these ideas. Every generation, as they get old and grumpy has said these things.


Well the truth is these opinions are full of crap and wrong as can be. Ask any teacher at any school and they will tell you that the vast majority of students are hard working, serious, kind human beings just trying to fit in and succeed in this crazy world. The vast majority of humans, probably in the whole world are honest, hard working, kind to their neighbor’s people who only want a fair share of life and work hard for it.

Are there bad, lazy, unproductive folks out there who just want everyone else to support their habits and do nothing? Of course there are but they are an extreme minority. I’m going to take a wild guess and say that 90% of people in the world are great people and 10% are complete idiots. Now a lot of those idiots end up in our prison systems where they belong and the rest are just wasting our air.

If you go back in time to say the cowboy days, when people lived mainly in very small towns, the only news you heard was if farmer Jones cow had his calf yet or other important daily activities of that area. Nowadays because of the mass media, those same people in that same small town get to hear about the mass murderer who killed a dozen small children in New York City. Do those people need to hear about that? Hell no. We would all be a lot better off mentally if we never heard any of that kind of crap happening in some far off place, which has nothing whatsoever to do with us.

We need to stop paying attention to the doomsayers and give credit where credit is due. To all of us out there doing good things, working hard to support our families and living an honest, productive life, we need to say “Good going and thank you for being who you are”.