Good News: People Can Deal With Barrage of Bad News

I know a man, otherwise well-adjusted, who while watching TV the other night felt like screaming at the top of his lungs: “I can’t take it anymore!”

All right, it was me, but maybe you can relate.

First, there was a report on the baseball strike. Owners fighting players. Once upon a time in this country, conflict was devoted to Haves and Have-Nots. But as if to underscore how combative society is, baseball offers the ultimate skirmish between the Haves and the Haves. The federal mediator said he’d never seen two sides in a labor dispute with more mistrust of each other.

Next came the nightly recap of the O.J. Simpson trial. On this day, the panel discussions centered not on the evidence but the racial makeup of the jury and whether the predominance of African Americans was, in itself, a crucial element. Some said yes, others said no and the argument went round and round, doing nothing but repeating age-old racial generalizations and offering unprovable opinions about what this particular jury might do.

Rounding out the evening’s entertainment was a report on the U.S. surgeon general nominee that focused on abortions he had performed. I trust you’re fairly familiar that there’s a controversy over abortions in this country.

It hadn’t seemed like a programming night out of the ordinary, but by evening’s end, I had a vague sense of exhaustion. I felt like I’d gone 10 rounds with television.

I think I know why: Everything I’d watched involved conflict. To coin a phrase, nobody seemed capable of getting along. Has the world always been this contentious?

Sure, I chose all the programming. I inflicted the punishment on myself. I could have turned off the set and taken a walk in the neighborhood or read some Chaucer, but I watched TV instead.

All I’m saying is that it wasn’t until I finally turned the set off that I realized what an ordeal the evening had been. I could have used 30 minutes in a hot tub.

Which leads to the question of the day: Can people handle this bombardment?

The answer, says Costa Mesa psychologist John Fry, is yes, maybe.

Fry, who has conducted numerous stress-management seminars for businesses, conceded that people’s ability to handle the onslaught of social conflict varies. The good news, however, is that we can survive this age of seemingly endless conflict.

Fry says he works on both body and mind. For example, learning how to relax your body during stressful situations helps soften the blows. There’s something called “relaxation training” that can help, Fry says.

As for your mind, you have to do just the opposite of what I did. That is, if you find yourself drawn to stories involving conflict, you have to put things in perspective.

“If a person looks at all that stuff--the baseball strike and racial strife--and tells themself, ‘Yup, the world is going to hell in a handbasket, everything bad is happening’ and then they read about crime and if they deduce from that that everything is bad, then they start feeling afraid (and) the tendency would be to over-generalize from specific bad events to thinking, ‘This is going to happen to me the next time I walk out to the parking lot.’ And people vary in that tendency to over-generalize.”

That’s where perspective comes in, Fry says. Ideally, he says, a person would realize that news reporting is selective. “It’s not a sampling of all life out there. It’s a sampling of information that’s important and interesting to people, and not necessarily indicative of everything that’s going on.”

But is the human spirit equipped to deal with this much strife? “I feel that there’s never a situation in life that demands worry,” Fry says. “Problem-solving, maybe, but not worry, even when dealing with very difficult situations.” Fry says he equates worrying to “interest paid on debt that may never come due.”

I’ll never become a non-worrier, but I need to bolster my defenses. There’s always going to be conflict, Fry says--”It’s part of the human condition”--but it doesn’t have to overwhelm us.

I think I’ve got it: Conflict is here to stay. The world will never be completely harmonious. Given the advanced state of communications, news of the conflict is available ‘round-the-clock.

The challenge is to keep things in perspective.

All right, I have my homework assignment for tonight.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.