state of the world: 1. good, or 2. bad (please circle one)

Today's headlines

One of the characteristics of socially-concerned and politically liberal people that I am striving to unlearn is bearing the burden of all the world's social problems. Maybe I made this up, but somewhere I got the idea that listening to the news and knowing all the things that are wrong with US society and the greater world and possible ways to fix them is my civic duty.

I even like listening, watching, and reading the news. I do it almost everyday. NPR's Morning Edition is as familiar as eating breakfast. I've been reading the SF Chronicle ever since we signed up for their $10 for 6 months trial subscription. For a couple of years, the BBC News was my web browser's homepage.

But most of the time, I've found that for me, consuming news doesn't make me more concerned or connected. I become cynical, depressed, and a bit hopeless. Hearing too many negative happenings which I have little to no influence over doesn't seem to be very healthy. I start making the generalization that human beings are doomed and nothing will ever get any better. What passes for news these days (mostly sensational and polarizing headlines) doesn't exactly help uplift this attitude.

So are we all doomed and powerless, suffering forevermore? Is the state of the world pretty bad? Can it ever get better?

With an effectively infinite amount of information at our fingertips these days, I could probably construct just about any generalized picture of "the world" that I want to. So instead of either crawling into a hole and trying to ignore it all or making up some happy fantasy that doesn't really exist, I've been trying use the information available to expand how I form my conceptions of what's going on outside my own personal life. Thankfully, many of the local NPR affiliates (like KQED, based in San Francisco) produce some pretty amazing media content that delves into issues more deeply than most news programs. Much of it you can great straight from their websites or through iTunes.

For example, To the Best of Our Knowledge is a weekly show produced by Wisconsin Public Radio. They cover a whole range of culture, mostly through one-on-one interviews. The whole idea for this post got started by listening to this episode: "Hope Springs Eternal." I love that I can hear interesting and dynamic people who probably wouldn't make the mainstream news cycle. The content seems to often hit a great balance between seriously engaging issues while being positive and uplifting. In other words, they give me some hope (amen to that!).

See a funny thing happens when I'm hopeful about a problem. I actually feel like I can do something, however small, to help solve it.

Our urban container garden

For example, from a recent episode, "Going Green," we hear from:

• Colin Beavan, a New Yorker who has radically changed his lifestyle to avoid as much negative environmental impact as possible. His blog is called No Impact Man
• Bell McKibben on his book Deep Economy arguing that more profit and more stuff does not make us happier or our lives any better
• Jeff Ferrell, a tenured professor who gave up teaching and lived off dumpster diving for a year
• Paul Hawken, who started counting organizations working for social justice and environmental sustainability and found over a million of them (no wonder our society hasn't fallen apart yet!)
• And a few more... Isn't this great!
  

To listen, you can subscribe to their iTunes podcast and get a 20 minute segment from each show, or go to http://www.wpr.org/book/index.html and listen to streaming audio.
Going Green can be found here: http://www.wpr.org/book/070527b.html

Other shows I think are great:

• Humankind
• This American Life
• KQED Quest (iTunes link)
• KQED Spark (iTunes link)
  
• KQED Truly CA Shorts (iTunes link)
  

Where do you find informative but uplifting but realistic sources of information? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.