“When I am 100 years old I will look like my gramma. I (will) also play with my granddaughter.”

Ohkaaay! Does this mean that Harlow thinks I look 100 years old? Or that she will look like me, as I am now, when she is 100 years old?  Does this mean that I don’t play with her and she wishes I did, or that she loves playing with me and will do the same with her grandchildren? Take it any way YOU want, I think she just wants to be like me when she is old! What a compliment!

What a huge responsibility. I read a post on Facebook not long ago; I wouldn’t change my grand-kids for the world, but I would change the world for my grand-kids. There are so many things I want to teach her, so many things I want to change for her.

I lead Harlow’s Daisy Girl Scout troop and one of the things Girl Scouts do is ‘make the world a better place.’  While discussing this concept during one of our meetings, I remembered an idea I had two years ago.  I wrote it down and put it away thinking I would come back to it later with fresh perspective. I presented this idea to my girls, they asked a lot of questions; they are 5 and 6 year-old girls! We decided we would try to ‘make the world a better place’ by at least trying to put this out there!

Dear (News Agency),

I would like to propose an idea that could possibly have astounding national, if not global, humanitarian consequences.

I would like to propose that one full day of television news coverage be given to the reporting of only good.  The day could possibly be one with the lowest viewer ratings, which in effect, might just turn that around.  Breaking (bad) news or headlines could be captioned and interested viewers could be referred to a website to obtain information if they want it.

In this time of nationwide/worldwide unrest, perhaps alleviating some of the hopelessness brought by being overwhelmed with almost nothing but dire news would have an impact on change.  The consequences for the news media/reporters/network would not only be building a better reputation with the skeptics, who believe the media enhances the problems (if just by the nature of the reporting), but it would require looking for and finding great humanitarian stories.  On the other hand, and what I am hoping for, is that the stories and all the wonderful things people do will become contagious because they are being acknowledged/reported.  The media would help promote this (or enhance the “problems” so to speak) by dedicating a broadcast day to only good and to really searching for and reporting the amazing things people do for each other.

We could actually watch the news with the whole family!

I personally don’t watch any news.  If there is something that I feel I must know I use the internet. This was not always the case however; although I won’t go into detail, some news should be preceded by a rating (G, PG, PG13 etc.).  I would absolutely watch the kind of news that I am proposing!

I am a grandmother of a 6-year-old.  I think that something like this would influence her tremendously.  I want her to know just how good people can be and also how good she can be.  I want her to learn compassion, love, community, kindness, charity, and that this world really is a great place to live in.

I am also a Daisy Girl Scout leader. One of our ‘Laws’ is: to make the world a better place; to leave things better than you found them. We have been talking about what we can do to accomplish exactly that. Our hope is to make changes in a very positive and lasting way and perhaps changing this one thing could be a start.

Sincerely,

There it is! What was interesting though, when we talked about the news the girls were exposed to, they came up with many stories: fire, burglary, fatal accidents, murder… I asked them to tell me stories about people helping other people, or people helping animals. Nope! Not much there!

As adults, we have seen some really great incidents of “compassion, love, community, kindness, charity, and that this world really is a great place to live in.” Where do we find it? Some news stations have added a humanitarian story to their broadcast, we can look things up on YouTube, Facebook , other social media; we can even participate in acts of kindness. But… how do our children learn about it? Well, we can model it; we can show them what we find on our social media sites; we can watch that one segment of news each night while covering their eyes and ears to the rest of the broadcast.They learn from adults. The information they get about the world around them, the world further than their immediate community,  should be immersed with good. I wish my girls had been able to tell me more about the humanitarian stories than about the troubles in our world. Perhaps some day. I do know however that Harlow, my granddaughter, will be exposed, by example if nothing else!