News Headlines

I had a huge AH HA! moment this morning. On the front page of the Mercury News was a story about the effects of divorce on a young family. Now, it is rare that I can pass up a good divorce story, just because. I read the headline and then slipped over to the photo captions and immediately recognized the last name as that of a Sutter family. As it was an extremely rare name it definitely caught my attention. I read on and realized that, yes, indeed it was our Sutter family. So there was this child and her parents along with her younger sister splashed all over the front page of the newspaper. Hmmm... what is it like for a 10 year old to read the dirty laundry of her parents' courtship, difficulty conceiving, couples theapy, affair or not an affair depending on who you talk to and ending with the details and $,$$$ spent on lawyers, child support and alimony. It bares to question, what were these parents thinking when they agreed to do a piece for the newspaper? Did they know that pictures of the mom and her two kids were be in living color on the FRONT page? Did Dad know that the claim he made about being nothing but a baby machine would be in print for his babies to read and reread for all of eternity? What were they thinking?

This of course led me to synthesize this article to all other human interest articles I am drawn to. I just love "train wrecks" and in all honesty read more of those articles than the news in Iraq, Iran, Samoa or North Korea combined. These articles are all about real people who live in real homes and are trying to do the best they can for their families. They all go to school somewhere and have friends whose parents read that paper and say, "Isn't that your friend so-and-so who's in your class?" Yeah. What is that like for a 6 and 10 year old child who are just trying to learn to read and add or subtract or write a decent essay?

I am sorry. I am sorry for my curiosity. I am sorry for the desperation that leads people to use the newspaper as a friend that will listen to their side of the story. I am sorry for these broken families and their children that must somehow now find their way in the world.