Bad News

One thing I've noticed since I started blogging is that people in Blogdom love bad news. They love illness and death. They can't get enough of it.

I first noticed this when I started reading a blog called Confessions of a CF Husband. The story was very engaging. The wife was waiting for a lung transplant when she found out she was pregnant. Her cystic fibrosis was at a critical stage. The couple chose to go through with the pregnancy and their beautiful daughter was born prematurely. But the entire pregnancy was fraught with danger for both mother and baby. Thousands of people commented on the blog every day, they were on television, in the newspaper.

The mother had her transplant and then the baby's development became the story. Week after week we saw that sweet child lying beside her stuffed animal so we could understand how tiny she was and then how she was growing. Again, thousands of comments a post.

Things stabilized. Readership dwindled. The author of the blog expressed his disappointment. But that was that. There wasn't anything heart-wrenching going on. He quit posting except for the now occasional update.

Good news doesn't make good press. Stories of triumph, love and happiness appear on page eighteen of the newspaper. We get to them after we slog through the murder trial updates, the contentious political campaign, the fight between local school board members. By the time we get to the good stuff, if we get to it at all without walking away in a funk, we feel jaded. Who cares about that soldier who came home when we might be entering into another war? What difference does it make that our high school won the championship when the schools are in such abysmal financial shape? So what if they raised a million dollars for cancer research when the real problem is that the pharmaceutical companies are making billions on treating us instead of making us healthy?

On my own blog, I noticed a jump in readership when my father died. It's back to normal now that I'm writing about more mundane issues. There is still bad news I could write about, but I think I'll pass for now. You've probably got enough of your own without looking or reading about mine. And if you don't, you can always buy the paper.