Five minutes of free write on a given one-word prompt with Five Minute Friday. See more linked posts here.

My day starts with the news. We stream it live and sip our coffee. I catch possibly a headline or two in between the loud littles, and with my contact-less/glasses-free face, I squint enough to see a sun or cloud or snowflake on today’s weather slot. The news is on, but it’s mostly background noise.

It seems like news should hold more weight, be more jaw-dropping, show-stopping.

It seems like news is always in the background, streaming on T.V., on Facebook, on Twitter, on everything. Maybe we overindulge our subconscious. Maybe we don’t even let ourselves really think about what is happening in the world.

Surely this makes sense: it might be too much. The news is actually filled with weighty, jaw-dropping things. It just doesn’t stop our show because we leave it in the background.

I have a friend who is deeply weighed down by the horrors of ISIS and human trafficking and even horrors from long ago. It seems healthy to me that she’s actually letting the news sink in, letting herself feel it. While the rest of us scroll through the Donald horrors, she’s up at night feeling the weight of fleeing refugees, children as sex slaves.

What if we all let the news be a show-stopper, startling us in our tracks and sinking us into the weight that others carry? Wouldn’t the show finally change?