"I Sit and Look Out"
--Walt Whitman
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and
upon all oppression and shame,
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish
with themselves, remorseful after deeds done,
I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying,
neglected, gaunt, desperate,
I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the
treacherous seducer of young women,
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love
attempted to be hid, I see the sights on the earth,
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see
martyrs and prisoners,
I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots
who shall be kill'd to preserve the lives of the rest,
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons
upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these--all the meanness and agony without end I
sitting look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
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Every time you turn on the television, you are bombarded with what is referred to as news. Good news, bad news, breaking news, weather news... The list of types of news goes on. Yet it's mostly all bad or unimportant. Constantly, we hear about murders, rapists, fatal accidents, police chases, uprisings, natural disasters, and other catastrophes. We watch in stunned silence some times, other times we shout out in frustration (mostly after political news reports).
I recall a time I became overwhelmingly angry at the news. I was tired of hearing about tragedies and exaggerated statistics (we all remember the "Summer of the Sharks" the news talked about... The reporters made it sound like sharks were preying on innocent people when, really, there were no more shark attacks that summer than any other year). I was becoming depressed because I was only hearing about the problems, and not hearing anything that was good about our world.
Whenever I see a report about a fire that's happening in a faraway place, I can't help but think "Why should I care? What does it have to do with me?" Sometimes, I feel this way even when the news story is about a nearby town. I would always change the channel, feeling a million times worse than before I watched the reports. There was no point for me to watch the reports because the situations were all out of my control, out of my reach.
The more we watch bad news, the more apathetic we become. I realized that after a couple days of being surrounded by tragedy after tragedy, I didn't care anymore. Joseph Stalin (yes, the Stalin that led the Communist Party of the Soviet Union) once said "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic." This is coming from a man who killed off about 20 million people during the 1930s.
Just like Walt Whitman's poem said, I feel like I sit and watch, and do nothing about it. Our main problem is not complacency, being self-satisfied and unaware of possible danger. Our problem is knowing all the information in the world and doing nothing with or about it. The Bible says in James 4:17 "If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them."
When I feel like I can do nothing about the world events I watch, I know I can pray. Prayer is the most simple, yet effective way to make a difference. Who knows? Maybe your prayers will lead you to be the change in the world.
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