I almost never watch the news. I almost never read the news. And yet, I do tend to more or less know what’s going on in the world. It’s hard to avoid news completely. It comes in through posts on Twitter and headlines on blogs. So it’s not that I stay out of touch with what’s going on and what people think about it; I just rarely get that news from traditional sources.

And what I’ve seen lately about swine flu pretty much sums up why that is. The media is designed to sensationalize news and to create what amounts to a sense of panic about what’s happening in the world around us. Every time that I turn on a news program I start to worry that I’m going to get murdered or lose my home or catch the latest deadly flu that’s going around.

And while I think it’s good to know what’s happening around you, I think it’s a lot better to get that information first hand from actually experiencing what’s going on around you than to get it from the headline reports about what others say is going on.

Blogs and social networking comments seem to provide a more well-rounded, balanced picture of what’s happening with real people in the world. They say, “yeah, I’m scared of this but I’m also doing x,y,z and can’t go crazy worrying about it right now”. Perhaps that’s why I liked these ten funny videos about swine flu. They remind us to put our fears into perspective, to laugh at our lives and to socialize with those around us instead of locking ourselves up in our fears.

Tags: entertainment, fear, hubpages, media, news, pandemic, swine flu, videos

The London Summit meeting of the G20 economies is set to take place in a couple of days and people are predicting disaster. The purpose of the meeting is for the financial leaders of the world’s major economies to come together to discuss solutions to the problems facing the global economy. However there is a lot of controversy surrounding the event and concerns from many that nothing will actually be done to resolve the world’s global financial problems.

There are a number of protests happening this week in London surrounding this event. The news is predicting that a failure to achieve a positive result from the meeting could end up causing these reltaively peaceful protests to get out of hand and to become future riots. Just what would cause that or how long it would take to occur is unclear.

What underlies all of this is a feeling of fear. People are afraid that the financial situation that we are facing isn’t going to get better and they’re terrified that it could get worse. Whenever fear motivates our actions, problems are created. Is there a way for us to approach the concerns of the economy without coming from a place of fear?

Tags: fear, g20, global economy, hubpages, london, money, news, politics, summit