Media may keep us all connected, but it isn’t making a better world.  It isn’t making us more enlightened.  It’s just making us meaner.

The news since February has been bad.  And I don’t mean the events they’re reporting on, I mean the things that are said, the way they say it, and the way it’s skewed.  Everything is geared toward making you afraid of your environment, your federal and local governments, and your own neighbors.  To hear the news tell it, we’re all bad people.

And it isn’t just official news media.  All of us regular people are doing it to.  Whether it’s on your Facebook page, your Instagram, your Twitter, you can’t say anything at all without someone somewhere letting you know that you’re the problem.

YOU are a bad (or whatever insulting, demeaning word you want) person.  YOU are this country’s problem.  YOU are your neighbor’s problem.  YOU are responsible for the actions of everyone else.  There is no personal responsibility.  We are all just a lump sum of whatever people group we’ve been assigned to by the media and we are to be judged as such.

The ugly truth is we’ve made ourselves afraid.  The news may have started it, but now we’re all culpable in spreading the fear.  And we’ve got to stop.  Take a breath and stop talking.  There is no voice of reason right now, not yours not mine not theirs.

This rant doesn’t apply to one side of politics or the other, one news media outlet, or any one person or people group.  It applies to everyone.  Me, you, everybody.

We are all hypocrites in some way.  We are all flawed.  We’re all just people doing the best we can.  We all need to give ourselves a break and give everybody else a break.