A Remedy for Newsaholics
When Israeli radio and television personnel recently went on strike, both services shut down, and news reports went off the air. The result was entirely unexpected.</br></br>As one astonished and delighted Israeli put it, "a calm settled over the country." It was as if the nation had swallowed a giant tranquilizer. Most Israelis believed that the unusual silence was a real pleasure-a mecheieh in Yiddish.</br></br>People could go about their affairs without the foreboding that they are on the verge of an impending crisis. An unforeseen and not inconsiderable benefit was the sharp reduction in traffic accidents.</br></br>There is an important lesson here for us as well. We are newsaholics-hooked on talk and drowning in words. We are overdosed addicts of news reports-most of them irrelevant, repetitive and depressing.</br></br>The sun is shining and the birds are singing, but we awake not to Mozart but to a morbid scene of fatal freeway accidents: The pickup truck jumped the center divider, and the fire engines and paramedics are on the way. But don't turn off-the stock market is sliding, the deficits growing, the dollar sinking, oil tankers battered, airplanes crashing, naval ships rocketed, and the Iranians wish us death. Politicians quarrel, prices go up and our spirits go down. The world is a very dangerous place.