Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Gentle NPR Rant
I love NPR - I listen to it in the car most mornings and afternoons for news and news analysis and some of the features. But I've just about had it with all the morning cancer talk. Is anyone else noticing this? I understand cancer is a scourge - a horrible disease that impacts nearly every family in a very profound way. But it feels like I wake up almost every day to the first-person account of dealing with the realities of mid-to-late-stage cancer. They even have a guy giving weekly updates of his life with the illness. But it's not just him. It seems like there's a near-daily expression of cancer-driven anguish, or at best a person trying to look on the bright side (in classic NPR monotone) of their otherwise horrible suffering.

Look, NPR, I can't take it any more. I want and need to feel sorrow for the suffering, and be inspired to do my part to be as helpful as I can be. But the news already offers so much of that without introducing me to a lineup of sufferers just because they give good journal. as it is, the headlines fill me with outrage over the horrors and sorrows of much of the world. I don't need to start out every other day marinating my outrage in a pool of cancer-stricken sadness, too. Please don't make me switch to sports talk, or God forbid, make me turn it off and have to actually think. Do the right thing. Limit first-person morning cancer sorrow to once every other week at the most.

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