18

LOOK FOR THE HELPERS

It was Saturday morning in The Age newsroom and all was peaceful. I munched on a slice of fruit toast, scrolling through Facebook. This was production day, when all the stories we’d been working on through the week were pulled together, placed on pages, and prepared for The Sunday Age going to print that evening. I was sitting at the news desk — in the round configuration of chairs and desks we call the ‘doughnut’ — cracking jokes with my colleagues and hoping for an early finish.

It was our picture editor who first alerted us to the horror the world was about to witness. ‘Something’s happening in Paris,’ she said, looking at the international wires. ‘An explosion.’

Things got messed up really quickly. News filtered through like fragments of broken English on a CB radio. A bombing. No, two bombings. Maybe three. Shots had been fired all over the city. There were reports of hostages at a football stadium. Chaotic scenes were being broadcast on the bank of televisions above our heads. It was night-time in Paris, the darkness broken by the flashing blue lights of police cars and ambulances. I spoke to a pregnant friend, via Facebook, who was in Paris on holiday with her husband. They were in their apartment in the centre of the city, listening to the sounds of gunshots outside.

I tracked down Australia’s then human rights commissioner, Tim Wilson, who was safe but told me his hotel near Notre Dame had locked its doors and he’d been instructed to stay away from the windows because of reports of grenades. ‘They’re now turning the lights out on the ground floor to try and make it look innocuous from the street,’ he said.

Not long after this, President François Hollande — who was evacuated from the Stade de France at half-time during a football friendly between France and Germany after three suicide bombers blew themselves up outside — declared a state of emergency, closing the nation’s borders and urging residents to stay home. He told his citizens, ‘At this moment, unprecedented terrorist attacks are underway across the city of Paris.’

In the newsroom, our team of reporters and editors worked swiftly to keep our readers up to date online with a situation that was constantly changing. The first half of the paper was scrapped to make room for an event that was beyond comprehension. We knew that many, many people would be dead. I hadn’t been back to full-time work long, only a few months. I was feeling fairly strong by this point, and coping well with life’s demands, but this was still a shock to the system. And yet it was the job; anything can happen. Adrenaline powered me onwards. Then we heard about the Bataclan. The true horror of the terror attacks became apparent in the details of what happened inside that theatre. Three men with assault rifles entered the venue where about 1,500 people were watching American rock band Eagles of Death Metal. They opened fire on the crowd, methodically executing music fans with merciless precision, reloading three or four times. Twenty minutes later, 89 people were dead.

By the end of the night, 130 people had lost their lives in six different locations across Paris. It was only when I got home after a 12-hour shift that the reality of what had happened came into sharp focus. It was the striking familiarity that connected me to this terror in a way that made my hands shake. These were football fans, young people enjoying a glass of wine at a sidewalk café, music lovers slaughtered watching the same band I had danced to during their visit to a Melbourne laneway festival just a few years earlier. All innocent loss of life is tragic, but nothing unsettles the fragile human psyche quite like the recognisable. It reminded me that while once, avoiding terrorism meant staying away from the world’s trouble spots, these days it seems nowhere is safe. And the gap between attacks grows ever shorter.

The collective helplessness is reflected in the futility of Twitter hashtags and temporary Facebook profile pictures. Buildings are lit up in the colours of the flag of the latest city to join a list none want to be on. We pray for Manchester, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Orlando. Then we move on. And it all begins again. What worries me most is how quickly I can process facts that once would have been unthinkable. Watching people being murdered on live television is no longer the stuff of dystopian nightmares. I find myself taking inventory of the dead, weighing up the numbers, the ages, comparing the severity of the horror to that which has come before. It has become one amorphous blur.

In an age defined by an endless stream of bad news, it’s easy to be dragged down by the mind-blowingly shitty things that people do to one another. For someone already prone to catastrophising, it can be difficult to gain perspective.

I shudder when I see viral YouTube videos of teenagers being beaten up in the schoolyard or red-faced men screaming racist abuse on public transport. When my Twitter feed is flooded with unfiltered pictures of lifeless Syrian children, I can’t bring myself to absorb what I’m seeing. Friends take to Facebook, imploring the world not to look away, but I do. It makes me feel weak. I need to be stronger than this. And yet my heart can’t take it. When I press play on that video, or read the accounts of people live-tweeting from the scene, I’m right there amid the panic and the terror. My anxiety spikes and I feel scared, despondent, worried for the world. So I have to stop looking.

For Generation Anxiety, the seemingly constant threat of terrorism and disaster has only exacerbated their sense of overwhelm.

After a suicide bomber blew himself up outside an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, killing 22 people, many of them children and teenagers, the UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children issued, for the first time, advice for parents on how to talk to children about terrorist attacks. It included listening to their fears and not dismissing them as silly, not providing overly complicated explanations of events that could provoke fear or confusion, and reminding them that they’re safe and surrounded by security. As educator Linda Lantieri discovered after the September 11 attacks, kids are resilient and can recover from even the most unimaginable trauma, but they need the skills to process it.

Online youth mental-health service ReachOut recently partnered with Twitter in a venture designed to help young people cope with the bombardment of bad news. They created a series of online factsheets offering tips on managing life in an era where unplugging is almost impossible. These included ‘Dealing with Bad World News’ and ‘Understanding Terrorism’. ReachOut chief executive Jono Nicholas told the ABC that the world had fundamentally changed for today’s young people, and when they’re constantly hooked into their phones, it can feel as if bad news is following them around. ‘Social media and technology is simply the way they navigate their day,’ he said.

To preserve my sanity, I have learned to limit my intake of bad news. Switching off is a form of self-defence. It hasn’t always been easy. My job as a journalist has been to bear witness. I haven’t faced the persistent trauma that colleagues covering crime, the courts, and conflicts regularly encounter, but like any reporter, I’ve had my share of stories that shook me. After the Black Saturday bushfires that killed 173 people in Victoria on 7 February 2009, I spent a day assigned to the Alfred Hospital’s burns unit, where the few people who survived the blaze were sent for treatment. I stood by the bedside of a man who was heavily sedated and bandaged from head to toe, and was told that when he came round he would learn that his entire family — including a two-year-old daughter — had perished. When Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over Eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 people on board, I huddled together with my friends Rania and Nick in the pub to debrief after an exceptionally long shift that saw us trying to pull together pen portraits of the 27 Australians who died — tributes that seemed hopelessly two-dimensional in the midst of such loss.

Another journalist friend, Beck, who covered the devastating earthquakes that destroyed Christchurch’s The Press building and much of the city, killing 185 people, told me, ‘Working at The Press post-quake was weird because you were living it, working it. And then you’d go to the toilet and the poster behind the door had a list of coping mechanisms like, “Avoid too much media”.’

Research suggests between 80 and 100 per cent of journalists have been exposed to a work-related traumatic event. Sometimes we witness horrific scenes without ever leaving the newsroom — the uncensored raw footage and images coming in from the coalface of a tragedy. On the scene, we see the same sights as emergency service first responders. Post-traumatic stress disorder among journalists with prolonged exposure to violence, misery, and tragedy is not uncommon. But the effects of terror, or the perceived threat of terror, can have a powerful impact even on those not directly affected. A survey conducted shortly after the September 11 attacks found that 17 per cent of the US population living outside of New York City reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. With the immediacy of social media and 24-hour television news, everyone now has a front-row seat to events that can have a profoundly damaging impact.

When my anxiety is heightened, watching the news can make it worse. It’s not that the negative media coverage makes me necessarily fear I’ll be blown up in a terror attack or abducted by a violent offender, it’s more the sense of dejection that envelops me when I ruminate on the state of the world. As humans we are biologically conditioned to pay more attention to bad news because when we sense danger it triggers the fight-or-flight response, preparing us to go into battle. British psychologist Dr Graham Davey, who specialises in the psychological effects of media violence, states that negative news can significantly change an individual’s mood, especially if the story emphasises suffering. Neurologically, our brain can actually perceive images of violence as a threat, which can make us feel warier of our environment. In addition, ‘Viewing negative news means that you’re likely to see your own personal worries as more threatening and severe, and when you do start worrying about them, you’re more likely to find your worry difficult to control and more distressing than it would normally be,’ he told The Huffington Post. This exposure to bad news can become a self-perpetuating problem as we start to interpret what we see on TV as proof that the world around us is inherently threatening, making us more depressed. The images change our mood, which makes us more likely to hone in on things in our environment that are negative or threatening. Just as focusing on gratitude allows us to see the good in the world, consuming too much bad news can have the opposite effect.

The morning after my shift reporting on the Paris attacks, I woke up and kept reading. I consumed every story about the Bataclan, imagining myself — as I’ve done so many times before — standing on the sticky carpet of a darkened band venue, beer in hand, rocking out to my favourite tunes. I couldn’t fathom how this could be the scene of a massacre. I turned to my Facebook page for light relief, but the first story that popped up was the tale of a lonely, doe-eyed dog tied to a tree in the backyard of a vacated bungalow. I fell apart. Then I banned myself from social media and all news for three days.

‘If it bleeds it leads’ has been a news-gathering maxim for decades, but these days, social media’s immediacy and the insatiable 24/7 news cycle, with its onslaught of depressing information, can make it feel as though we’re perpetually on the brink of the apocalypse. Events or details that we would once have been shielded from are presented in vivid detail. It’s hard to fathom what has happened to us as a species when reading about the crowd of onlookers who encouraged a suicidal man to jump to his death from a multi-storey carpark, shouting ‘get on with it’ as they snapped selfies while police negotiators tried to talk the man down.

The rational part of me is reminded that this sensationalist and shocking view of the world is curated through Facebook algorithms and the perilous state of the media landscape. I’m seeing an edited view of the world, not a representative picture. All too often, footage is published just because it can be. The financial imperative to drive traffic to struggling news sites has led to a decline in editorial standards that has seen graphic or emotionally manipulative content published, with little thought given to the consequences.

As much as I’ve railed against the dumbing down of my industry, I must take my share of the blame. I’ve written countless stories that ensure the most poignant, heart-tugging details go straight to the top. Clickbait headlines and social media posts are crafted to reel readers in with snippets of human tragedy. It has become such a journalistic trope that Rania coined a phrase to describe the phenomenon: the ‘misery hang’. It’s the teasing headline that toys with our emotions but compels us to look — the online equivalent of slowing down to watch the aftermath of a car accident on the freeway. A few of us have taken to group messaging one another every time we spot a particularly blatant example of the genre.

He texted his mum he was fine. Minutes later, he was dead.

Michelle was in agony. Doctors said it was a temper tantrum. She died.

Ashleigh went out with friends to celebrate her twentieth birthday. But a fateful decision to walk home resulted in a terrible tragedy.

The more people click on this stuff, the more the formula is employed. And so the cycle of misery continues. Editors now have access to detailed metrics on every story they publish, and the dark stuff seems to rate pretty well. Maybe it’s human nature to seek out the worst versions of ourselves, if only to be reassured that no matter what mistakes we’ve made, we are at least better than that.

But the bombardment of awfulness does not spur people into action. In fact, a constant stream of negativity can lead to a sense of ‘learned helplessness’, making us feel disempowered and fatigued by the apparent hopelessness of global events. A study of 2,000 people conducted by Denise Baden, Associate Professor in Business Ethics at the University of Southampton, found that negatively framed news causes disengagement, avoidance, pessimistic moods, and anxiety. Participants who were exposed to two environmental stories were much more likely to be motivated to act in an environmentally friendly way after watching a report that focused on the success of an ocean clean-up campaign than they were after watching a report that centred on damage to the ocean caused by pollution. Similarly, watching a story about the atrocities in Syria led to a 38 per cent reduction in mood for women and 20 per cent for men, while watching a report about peace talks between the United States and Iran had the opposite effect. Baden now tours universities, teaching workshops for journalism students on ‘constructive journalism’ — a movement that is helping to rewrite the script of how we perceive the world.

The UK website Positive News, run by editor-in-chief Seán Dagan Wood, is at the forefront of the movement, with its ‘If it succeeds, it leads’ inversion of traditional news priorities, and became the world’s first global media cooperative after raising more than $450,000 at launch. It is now owned by more than 1,500 readers, journalists, and supporters. Dagan Wood wrote in the Huffington Post:

We face colossal and escalating challenges as a global community: climate change and social inequality, to give just two examples. And on the individual level, people are suffering across the spectrum of circumstances in which humanity finds itself. But at the same time it would be wrong, in our knowledge or imagination, to disown any one of their achievements, strengths, loves and joys. At the global level, there is also another side to the story.

When I dipped into the site, the stories were varied and topical, covering areas such as society, economics, science, and the environment, but all had a positive slant. In the days after Donald Trump walked away from the Paris climate deal there was an article outlining how American businesses were speeding towards a low-carbon future regardless of what was being decided in Washington. Another looked at how Iceland had radically cut rates of teenage drinking and substance abuse through investment in sporting programs and parenting classes. There is also a regular section called ‘What Went Right’, which charts a long list of positive signs of progress in the previous few months. After half an hour of reading, I felt considerably more hopeful about the future of our planet.

And there remains much to be hopeful about if we know where to look. Oxford University’s Our World in Data tracks how global living conditions are changing over time. It looks at a range of measures, including poverty, violence, human rights, health, and literacy. Founder and researcher Max Roser created the site to counter the perception nine out of ten people share: that the world is not getting better. A recent Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute poll showed that across 14 countries, the public perception of rates of teenage pregnancy, immigration, and murder were much higher than they actually are. What the media focuses on and how it chooses to report it can play a major role in how people respond to events happening around them.

Roser points out that the news cycle doesn’t reflect how the world is changing; it simply tells us what goes wrong in the world. It focuses on single events that are often bad — plane crashes, terrorism attacks, natural disasters, and election outcomes we’re not happy with. Positive developments happen in a much more gradual way, and rarely make the headlines because the media is event-focused.

Roser says that the story we tell ourselves about our history matters and is a vital driver of change:

Knowing that we have come a long way in improving living conditions and the notion that our work is worthwhile is to us all what self-respect is to individuals. It is a necessary condition for self-improvement. Freedom is impossible without faith in free people. And if we are not aware of our history and falsely believe the opposite of what is true, we risk losing faith in each other.

While Roser concedes that huge problems remain and we can’t afford to be complacent, there is something comforting about the statistical evidence he provides. At the start of the twentieth century, 36 per cent of the world’s children died before their fifth birthday. By 1960, this had dropped to 19 per cent, and in 2015, it was just 4 per cent. Progress on poverty has been even more remarkable. In 1850, 92 per cent of the world’s population was living in extreme poverty — surviving on less than $US1.90 a day. A hundred years later, this had only dropped to 72 per cent, but in the last few decades the improvement has been steep. In 1990, 37 per cent of people lived in extreme poverty, compared to just under 10 per cent in 2015. Of course, it’s horrible that one in ten of the world’s citizens live below the poverty line, but the significant and continued advances paint a picture of progress that we can’t always see when looking at global events in isolation.

Surely with all the terror attacks and global conflicts, though, we’re living in a more dangerous world than our forebears? Not according to Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker, whose 832-page bestselling opus, The Better Angels of Our Nature: why violence has declined, analyses centuries of human existence and puts forth the hypothesis that we are currently experiencing the least violent, least cruel, and most peaceful period in our history. He maintains that every kind of violence — including murder, rape, genocide, animal cruelty, and homophobic and racist attacks — has declined, and we are now living in a more peaceful world than ever before. It’s a view shared by Australian moral philosopher Peter Singer, who stresses that a person born today has less chance of dying a violent death than at any other time in human existence. If we look at the longer trend, we’re becoming more humane, rather than less.

When I returned to Facebook after the Paris attacks, I asked my friends whether they ever felt overwhelmed by bad news and if so what they did to manage that. The response was a resounding yes. For my friend Jo, my question struck a raw nerve. It led to a profound revelation that came pouring of out her. She wrote,

I’ve spent my life looking after people and believing that unless I do ‘something’, no-one else will and that it’s my responsibility to fix things. On Saturday night we went to a ‘Climate for Change’ event at a friend’s house and I came out feeling like if I didn’t do ALL THE THINGS then it would be my fault if the terrible things foretold came to pass. And so I got up yesterday morning and went grocery shopping and I walked around the shops and made sure that I bought only what we needed and nothing more so as not to be wasteful.

But it wasn’t enough. She went home and wrote an imploring letter to her local MP. She tweeted Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition leader Bill Shorten, pleading with them to act on climate change. She still felt helpless. To counteract the anxiety, she lay on the couch and ‘watched soothing, pleasant ABC fluff and felt much better for it’. Later, as she got into her car on the way to a family Passover meal, she had a revelation: she couldn’t fix the world.

I knew this already but somehow in that state of panic one develops a God complex and believes — much like the anxious flyer who thinks that it’s the force of their anxiety that is keeping the plane in the air — that unless I personally do ALL THE THINGS about climate change that right this minute the permafrost will give way and a hole will open and swallow the Earth.

Her answer was to go back to the simple things. She would stop trawling the news. Instead she would retreat to the garden, cuddle her dog, eat delicious food, and bake.

Stopping to appreciate life’s finer details was a common theme in my friends’ responses. As Amanda put it, ‘Sometimes I like to “live in the small”. Really try and appreciate the small, good stuff. A nice daytrip to the markets, delicious dinner, a beer with a mate. I’m not saying a total disconnect with the larger world, but being happy in our own helps to contribute to the bigger.’

It can seem self-indulgent to pamper yourself when children are being massacred in war zones, and human rights abuses are being prosecuted in your own backyard. But I’ve found that if I want to make a difference I have to be armed with the energy to fight for change. As Veronica often reminds me, ‘You cannot hold up a friend if your own arm is broken.’ Allowing yourself to take a break and live in the small is not selfish, it’s an act of replenishment.

Another friend had a simpler solution: ‘I spend substantial periods of time watching videos of dogs greeting their owners. It works a treat.’

A woman I went to school with told me how she made a conscious decision to stop watching all news and reading newspapers when she was struggling with depression. ‘I didn’t carry the world’s problems anymore, and even though I am constantly out of the loop, I don’t mind that at all. It’s preferable to the alternative. The wider world made me too sad to function as a person, so I had to take myself out of it.’ Six months after making that choice, she went back to college and is now studying at university. While she doesn’t believe her depression was caused by absorbing bad news, she found that opting out of the news cycle was hugely beneficial: ‘When you are fighting the demons in your head, you don’t need to be watching them on your TV screen or reading about another atrocity every day as well. I felt so utterly powerless that I had to do something, so I got out. Maybe that’s not a responsible way for a grown woman to deal with the world, but it worked for me.’

When I find myself, like Jo, spiralling into a blind panic about the state of the world, I have to log off. And I’ve accepted that while I can make a difference in my own small way, there is much I cannot change. I have to channel my energy into what I can control. So I try to break it down into bite-sized chunks I can swallow. I focus on ‘living in the small’ because it’s the only way that works.

On the day of the 2016 US presidential election, I was sitting in Veronica’s waiting room when it became apparent that Donald Trump was on track to win. As I watched the news come in, my anxiety escalated. Here was a man who was exposed as a misogynist, who had boasted about ‘grabbing women by the pussy’, and who wanted to ban Muslim immigration and build a giant wall on the Mexican border, reigniting a white supremacist movement many of us had hoped was all but extinct. Veronica and I spent the first part of our session talking about how scared I was about what this meant for humanity, and what it said about the divisiveness and fear that permeate our lives. I felt despondent that hate had won over hope. But then she said that these tumultuous events only served to underscore how important it is for us to strive to live well — to nurture our relationships and be present in every moment, even the uncomfortable ones. If we want to change the world, we start with ourselves. We have to be the change we want to see. That means not surrendering to hopelessness but trying to live with compassion, kindness, and a willingness to understand the fears of our neighbours. That may seem pointless in the face of overt racism and misogyny, but as Chido Govera taught me, the only thing we can control is how we behave in response.

My friends with children make a difference by raising their little people to be that change. A former high-school classmate of mine who now works in paediatric intensive care said she sees families coping with situations that most people can’t even imagine, making at times heartbreaking decisions, but this also serves to give her markers for how to live:

I see the resilience of the children and families, which makes you realise that there are things that we can’t control. At the end of the day, especially if it’s been a tough one, I go home grateful for what I have and give the kids a cuddle. So with the news, I take the attitude that there are things I can’t do anything about, but I can bring my children up right, to be respectful, kind, and caring.

I don’t think we should gloss over injustices or turn our heads from tragedy. But if a cycle of negative news leaves us paralysed by apathy and helplessness, we are effectively turning away anyway. Perhaps we need to look for the positives so we can have the strength to counter the negatives. On an individual level it can start with something as simple as a gratitude journal — training the brain to find the chink of light on a dark day. Even in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity it will be there. When something awful happens I turn to the famous quote from children’s TV host Fred Rogers, who said, ‘When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”’

After tragedy came to Melbourne in January 2017, when a man allegedly drove his car at high speed through Bourke Street’s pedestrianised mall, killing six people, including a three-month-old baby, and injuring 30 more, I took comfort from what happened immediately after the event. As bodies lay strewn across the pavement, pedestrians, café staff, and city workers on their lunchbreaks ran to help. In the midst of chaos and terror, when it was still unclear what was unfolding and whether this was the act of a lone assailant or the harbinger of a larger attack, countless members of the public put their own safety to one side and got down on their hands and knees to administer first aid and words of comfort to strangers.

One of the most poignant things I read was written by a young man, Henry Dow, who had rushed to the aid of a woman who had been struck by the car. In a Facebook post that was shared more than 17,000 times, he described how his legs carried him across the street to help, ‘almost on autopilot, swearing under my breath repeatedly as it sunk in what had just happened’. As he rolled the woman on her side, supporting her neck and holding her hand, he heard gunshots. Henry didn’t know it then, but it was police officers firing at the alleged perpetrator. Kneeling under a skinny tree on the footpath, he was helped by a man called Lou, who grabbed Henry’s shaking hand and firmly told him to keep it together, that he was okay, and that they needed to be strong for this woman. The man was not, as Henry had presumed due to his calm and pragmatic demeanour, an emergency-services worker. He was a taxi driver. It was Lou’s heroism that prompted Henry to write about what he witnessed that day. His words moved me to tears:

We have all seen images and opinions flood the media over the past 24 hours. If you feel like shaking your head and feeling sad for the state of humanity, I implore you: Don’t. There was no evil on Bourke Street yesterday; one sick young man did a terrible thing, and hundreds responded with the love and sense of community that makes Melbourne such a beautiful city, and Victoria such a great state. There was only kindness in the voices of the police who came to relieve us. I felt only love when an older man hugged me, having just told a father he had lost a daughter. Many images and sounds will stay with me much longer than I might like, but I am glad to have seen, and hope I never forget, just how brave and loving strangers can be.