The Love of Dirty Laundry

 

sully - verb - damage the integrity of, soil, defile (Google)

In the 1970s, before the woke were awake, Don Henley of The Eagles wrote a song called "Dirty Laundry" about how humanity craves negativity. The "bubble-headed bleached blonde comes on at five/She can tell you about the plane crash with a gleam in her eye/It's interesting when people die." Henley's satirical bent is straight as an arrow, aiming directly at people's penchant for bad news. It's true. Maybe the anchors on the evening news are no longer bubble heads (I don't watch Fox News), but the lead stories still tend to be about murder, corruption, death, and deception, all what Henley terms "dirty laundry." As a consolation prize, there is usually about one minute left at the end of the broadcast for a human interest story, a.k.a. good news. Yet it is as though the majority, the pessimists, want to throw the minority, the optimists, a bone just to say that they did. For me, an optimist, it isn't enough to stay healthy mentally. 

What is tragic is that there is enough good news out there, but because of the human race's propensity for dirt, it just doesn't get reported. Case in point: on September 11th, my daughter and I were lounging on the beach at Sandy Hook, gazing out at lower Manhattan, thankful for its present intactness, when a plain-clothed soldier approached us to ask whether the skyscrapers in the distance belonged to New York City. Her question made it crystal clear that she wasn't from the East. I asked her where she was from and why she was in New Jersey, and she told me that she was a marine from Washington stationed at Fort Dix, helping to distribute Afghan refugees to parts known: Germany, Canada, and the U.S. I asked her whether or not it was going well, and she replied, "Yes, very well. In fact, the entire process has been exceptionally well organized." Good news. One would think it would travel to the six o'clock news or the front page of  The New York Times, but it didn't probably because it would have come as a drastic contradiction of the Biden administration's handling of the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. God forbid that should happen, and we should hear what the President is doing right. "Kick'em when they're up; kick'em when they're down...We need dirty laundry."

News may not be entirely "fake," just skewed in the wrong direction to attract attention. Can this be changed? Maybe. It just may not be profitable to do so. Human beings would have to change intrinsically to want to hear uplifting information on a full-time basis. Can that be done? Maybe. It would just take a lot of effort, the right detergent and some bleach to clean the dirty laundry. Maybe it is just easier to wear sullied clothes.

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