Health & Fitness
Old American Century (Part 2)
Part 1 can be found here.
When I was very young, I would devour the news. I would read the paper every day, would watch the Sunday talk shows and “60 Minutes,” and would listen to talk radio on NBC and CBS. My mother would read US News and World Report, saying it portrayed the news better than Time and Newsweek. Back then, articles were not long sound bites; they were written by professional journalists and actually had some intellectual heft.I was able to figure out what was “real” and what was “spin”.
Fast forward to today. Many more sources of information treat journalism as optional, if it exists at all. With so many sound bites, it is very hard to tell where “truth” resides. How can a person tell what is going on when we have a media that usually tells only the “news” where the situation is not “normal.” The closest thing we have to normal information in the media is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics or poll results. The former has reported on the labor output of this nation for many years, and polls have become so institutionalized that we can track how people feel on certain issues over time.
Even with all the facts available from these two sources, we still have a conundrum. Context is needed to make these facts “real.”Facts have to be communicated in such a way they make sense to that person's context, their view of reality. Don't teach a person what not to do, show them what to do that's in their own best interest. By providing feedback on the individual behaviors and identifying how to do the action “better, safer, (pick a word)”, the subject has the opportunity to make a decision based upon facts and data where normal and not normal is defined.
Find out what's happening in Richfieldwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
This is what is missing in our conversation. Don't tell me what does not work. Tell me what will work, how it will work, and what is my part, and your part, in it too. Include facts, and the context that makes them “real”. We should not be playing by P.T. Barnum's rules.