Imagine a Better World

Over the dim roar of the newsroom, running feverishly on deadline, I heard the phone ring, followed by the editor's attentive silence.  I looked over, caught his wrinkled brow and waited.  He glanced back with an expression I knew all too well.  There's a kind of coach - team rapport among editors and reporters. On this particular morning, that relationship was going to change my life forever - not in a big dramatic way, rather as a subtle awareness that would open a door through which I would never return.

The day after Christmas was often bleak, even dismal, in the declining old industrial city, with its weary store fronts, various bars, lower income housing dating back a century or more. It had a kind of morning-after feeling to it,  that had spilled into the streets from the holiday before. A rancid silence hung in the air as I drove past empty liquor bottles, an occasional McDonald's bag, cigarette boxes and butts on my way into the police station at 5:30 a.m. 

It was the beginning of a typical day at the paper.  After the usual, perfunctory chat with the officer at the counter, I was ushered into the inner sanctum to gather the police reports from the night before, including Christmas Day.  

I wrote down all the details from the day's and night's activities.  Since reporters are no stranger to humanity's depravity - especially depravity from binging on alcohol and drugs, too prevalent in decaying old cities - I wasn't particularly alarmed or really even interested in the low-level behavior of the town over the holiday weekend.

I turned away from my editor's phone conversation and returned to writing up the boring police blog.  It's easy when you don't care.

When my desk phone rang from an inside line, I looked over as my editor nodded to me to answer my phone.  

"Can you take this call?  This guy's pretty upset.  He says he got arrested last night for a domestic and he doesn't want it to go in the paper,"  my editor said, with a slight, only barely distinguishable hint of concern in his voice.

"I have the reports from last night here.  Do you know which guy he is?  There's a lot of them," I said, wincing at the thought of what I was going to have to deal with.

"I think he's the guy who smashed in his wife's car with his fist," he said matter-of-factly.

"Yeah, I got it. I'll talk to him," I said, as my editor backed out of the call leaving a very distraught middle-aged sounding man on the line.

In the course of that conversation, some of which my editor listened in on from across the newsroom, I went from complete apathy to a deep concern for this man's plight: alcoholism, possible mental illness and probable domestic violence.  He didn't beat his wife, only threatened her and was possessive and jealous. I didn't know how to deal with this angry, sad man.  I felt completely at a loss. He begged me not to run the incident from the night before.  He didn't hurt anyone and it was too embarassing to have his friends, and the other guys at the local VFW Post, see what had happened.  I put him on hold and went over to my editor.

"Is it possible to not run what happened?"  I asked him.

"No," he said, unequivocally.

"Do you think we could make an exception just this one time?"  I heard myself pleading, unaware that I'd picked up the caller's cause and wanted to run with it for him.

"Sorry.  No.  We can't.  I get calls like this all the time and if I did it for him, we would have to do it for everyone, and that's not journalism.  Journalism is telling what happened regardless of how remorseful people feel after the fact."

I really heard that.  He was right. 

I went back to my desk. As I told the caller I had to run the story, he began to cry, sobbing, and then my heart broke for him.  This man was so broken, so low, in so much despair that he was begging a reporter at a small daily newspaper in a very dismal town not to tell his story.  I wanted to just accidentally leave him out of the blog, but I had to run it.  It was not my problem.  

A few minutes later, my editor looked over at me again, must have seen my drawn face,  and came back over.

"You can't weep with 'em," he said.  "Tell him that you have to go.  We've got a paper to get out this morning."

For days, I reflected on that man's sorry existence.  While I wished I could help him, I couldn't.   Even then, I knew he had to help himself.  

That man's cry still rings in my heart.  He was the voice of all humanity.  The entire human race is sobbing in despair, without any hope, living in what has become one big, corrupt, dismal old town.  Where is our hope? 

I know now that we can change our lives and our world simply through our will to change our thoughts and words.  We can take a small, dark, broken life and become a lighthouse of vibrational energy and love for our own lives and those all around us.  We have the power to live our lives as large and as beautiful as we choose. We can also, alternatively, focus on the small, dark, nasty things that happen in the world.  It is as simple as a matter of choice.  We can stop and think about what we're thinking about.  We can stop the madness and think differently. Each time we choose to look up, pray for, wait for and expect help, it will be given to us. 

Help comes when we ask for help, especially when we ask for the help to change our small, dim lives of pettiness or not let our anger take control of us, or think or speak negatively about a neighbor, engage in gossip, or even focus generally on the negative rather than the positive, bright and creative.  

We can also choose to stop worrying and thinking about what we don't want to have happen and consider what we do want to happen, ask for it and then have trust and have faith that love is all around us and we can have what we want.  We completely flip our minds around, from hell to heaven, when we think about what we do want, about what is beautiful in another human being, and realize that any act of violence or hate is only a cry for more love.  Love stops violence and brokenness; defensive rage only propagates it.

Hate and violence are weaker customers than love and creativity.  By raising your own spiritual vibration by thinking and speaking positively, you strengthen your mind where the disease of negativity cannot thrive, and you magnetically attract into your life positive, loving and creative events and friends. And, just in case you don't believe me.  Try it.  Try it for just one week as an experiment and see what happens.

What if we did that?  What if every time someone said something unkind, you realized instead that they were asking you for love, then you wouldn't react to them. Instead, you'd respond to them with kindness, compassion, even forgiveness. 

I believe we can choose to care, to look at what is beautiful and bright, healing, hopeful, noble and dignified.  We can choose to be kind, to reel in our tempers, disappointments and hurts.  I don't mean not to feel them.  I mean not to give them the power to bring us down.  It may be the hardest thing some of us will ever do.  But, we must. To find deep within ourselves the light of our divinity, is to get up out of the gutter, turn off the nightly news, put down the evening newspaper, and listen to what is beautiful. 

Imagine a better world.  Whenever you can, at every chance, when you meet someone, speak kindly, send them joy and love in just a smile, with a positive intention.  That man back at the News could have turned his life around.  I'll never know if he did, but his misery can be a lesson for our abounding joy. 

I believe we can evolve into noble beings of light, of immeasurable value, so greatly loved, if we would only try.  Our Creator loves us and waits for us to receive His love and live in the sunshine of that love, allowing it to heal our lonely hearts, and make us the magnificent beings we were always meant to be and restore our Earth home into a paradise.The choice is simply ours.  I believe we can do this. I believe in us.