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Non-News
By Julie | August 29, 2007
I was standing in the check out line skimming the magazine covers while my cashier scanned and bagged more groceries then I thought I’d have to buy before I became a family of four. Hillary Duff was on the cover of US magazine. The title of the magazine read, “How Hillary did it. Duff tells US her diet secrets – and how she almost when too far.” Hillary posed in a bikini with as little fabric as possible while still covering her in the appropriate places.
When did non-news become news?
We’ve have “Bennifer”. We were supposed to believe they were going to last for-eva! Aren’t they both married to other people now? Magazine covers followed Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, wondering when she’d be pregnant. The same cameras followed him cheating with Angelia Jolie? (I felt sorry for Jennifer Anniston having to see pictures of her husband with another woman every time she bought eggs.) Recently a cover said it was Shocking! Brajelina had broken up. Why shocking? I don’t know a lot of lasting relationships that begin by breaking up a marriage. Is there a magazine that hasn’t featured Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes on its cover? If they weren’t willing the paparazzi swiped a shot, put them on the cover, and a reporter wrote a piece speculating on them, and their baby. I thought Katie Holmes was adorable before I had to see her glued to Tom in a zillion poses before my bread could be rung up. Adorable no more, sorry Katie. Then there’s Jessica Simpson. If it weren’t for magazine covers I would not even know who she was, or that she had a show on MTV and is now divorced from her reason for having the show. Now, I just wish I didn’t know who she is. There are more, unfortunately, crammed into my brain because their non-news ended up photographed in a bikini and plastered on the cover of every magazine on the ‘news’stand, that’s a brief synopsis. Back to Hillary Duff, who for me goes into the Jessica Simpson category, I wouldn’t know who she was if it weren’t for ‘news’stands. However, I do not find her as annoying as Simpson, so I won’t put in the ‘wish I didn’t know who she is’ category. She doesn’t appear on covers as often. For now, I just hope she is one of many I won’t end up knowing more about.
Love lives, cheating, women in bikinis, break-ups. These things happen every day. This is not news. Sadly, because our magazines and news broadcast are being contaminated with non-news, a lot of real news is being missed, some of it may even be your news. Every day, real people conquer real struggles, struggles bigger then squeezing your formerly size 3 body into a size 0, and what bikini you’ll wear for your photo op to show off! (Yippee!)
Today, there are men and women going to jobs they don’t like because they don’t know how to get ones they’ll love, and even if they did, would they pay enough? Raising gas and health insurance prices keep them where they are, because if they make a change, will they be one of the millions of American’s without health insurance. Another family takes their son to the doctor, without a clue how they’ll pay because they have no health coverage but their son is really sick. Maybe both parents are working, but neither company offers it coverage. Maybe they’re entrepreneurs, and the dream they’ve risked everything is just paying the bills, so they can’t afford health insurance. They paid for it themselves a few years back. But with costs raising every year, and a few more kids to feed they couldn’t afford it any longer. So they set up a payment plan with the office, and pray they’ll be able to cover the new bill and keep up with all the others. That’s overcoming adversity! That’s bigger news than an actress who’s triumphed because she was on the verge of becoming a size 5, so she hired a personal trainer, and chef to cook her nutritious meals. Soon she’s back into wearing the equivalent of an infant sized onesie, which showed her sculpted abs Photoshop enhanced after her photo shoot.
There are single Moms, and single Dads, dropping kids off in daycares, who didn’t get to fight the “Mommy wars” because it’s only one person raising their kids, them. But they do it. They work. They clean the house, do the laundry, give the hugs, help with homework, go to bed exhausted, get up in the middle of the night to change wet sheets as a child is potty training, only to get up early to do it all over again. I bet they’re tired, but they don’t stop, because… They. LOVE. Their. Kids.
Whoever you are, working moms wishing you could be stay at home moms. Stay at home moms wanting to be working moms. Or moms who are content in your roles, but still feel so exhausted at the end of the day. Then you wonder with your husbands if your kids are ok, and if you’re doing a good job raising them.
Maybe you’re a dad wishing you could just see them all more, feeling pulled to find that balance between work and home. Or you watch you own wife go to work, and you kiss the boo boos, and teach finger painting, insisting they keep it off the couch! Or you’re a dad who’s watched his wife pack up the kids, and a moving van full of your shared belongings, slapped you with child support and alimony as she fights you for every visitation you have with the kids you wish you still tucked in at night.
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Are you a college students feeling guilty for every moment you’re not studying because you’re terrified of losing that full ride scholarship? But you still want that college experience, you’re in a new town, you want friends, you want to go to the parties. Or, you have no scholarship, but took out loans you pray you’ll be able to pay back after graduation? So, you work your way through school, and cram in studying in the wee hours even though you’re almost asleep.
Are you in high school on the verge of ‘starting out’, afraid one wrong move will put you on the wrong path, and not guarantee you 70k your first year out of college. Or maybe your schools been hard, and you feel so lost. You’ve spent every day since kindergarten feeling like you don’t fit in, hoping things will get better after high school, at the same time terrified they won’t.
Maybe you’re the child who spends every night praying Mommy and Daddy won’t fight tonight, they won’t yell. Meanwhile, Grandma across town in the nursing home doesn’t know what’s really happening. But every night she prays for your family’s protection. This side of heaven, you’ll never know how much her prayers have saved you. Grandma just wishes your parents would take you a visit more. She wonders why they always seem unhappy, but thinks it’s because they’re trying to climb some ladder that doesn’t really exist. So Grandma sits alone, wanting to help, or just have someone to talk to. Back at home, your parents don’t want to live this way, they feel trapped in a marriage the hard knocks of life is destroying. They want to reach out to each other, but after all that yelling, they don’t know how. But they hold on, hoping what they had will return.
Maybe you’re disabled, trapped in a body you can’t move. You can’t get out of your own bed, or back in it. When you wake up for a glass of water, you call for your caregiver, who has to wake up to help you take a sip. There are so many things you want to do, but your body is unresponsive. So the hands of other people carry out your tasks, as you explain word for word what needs to be done. But you don’t give up. You have too many things you want to get done!
People everyday live with limitations, the list goes on and on.
And yet, Hollywood wants to be glorified even though we watch real life heroes overcome circumstances that threatened to destroy them in so many more difficult ways then an aspiration to look, but not actually be, anorexic.
If you didn’t think you’d make it, but you hung on, you kept going, and trying, and you got through, congratulations. You’ve performed a feat more newsworthy than most of the news on the covers of magazines today. If you’re in the middle of something, hang in there. It can be so hard, but when you make it, you’ll be so much stronger, life will be better. As an added bonus, if you’re nearly at your limit, your next struggle is probably a long way off. If you don’t know if you can go on, pray for some kind of reprieve, God may offer some surprise, and give you more strength. If you’ve been through it, or are going through it, but still manage to laugh, and smile at the cashier ringing up your milk (who is also forced to look at non-news all day) congratulate yourself. That’s rising above adversity, its happening every day, in homes all across this world. But magazines continue to sell us non-news in the form of bodies willing to hide their brains, bear cleavage, and insure their butts like Jennifer Lopez did. You are far more newsworthy.
Maybe you think it’s not enough, the struggle was too hard, and you want your time in the lime light. There is one lime light you will always have, and its better then the fake one dished out in the non-news circuit….
http://www.godtube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=bbb04ab3b2c1fb244f33
Topics: Encouragement, Life and Living | No Comments »
