How horrible are we?

The news does seem to be rather dominated by stories of how horrible humans are to each other at the moment. I'm not talking about the big politics horrible stuff (war, recession, terrorism, arresting troublesome MPs) more about the level of just how people get along, or don't.

You have the truly vile stories like the teenager who beat a man to death who was trying to assist the lad's unconscious friend, then bragged about it. There's the high profile court case of the Mum who's accused of organising the kidnapping of her own daughter in order to collect the reward money, obviously.

Then you have stories of just misanthropic shitness. A court heard today that a man left his wife (who clearly had a set of difficult problems) wedged down the side of the bed. But it was fine because he left her pork pies and some water. You've got the gits who killed four swans in the Midlands. Then there's the dentist who urinated in his surgery sink before treating a patient, not to mention that he used his instruments to clean his nails and ears... ewwww.

Then there's the Mum who left her baby in a station toilet, the man who shot his neighbours dog, smelly bikers offing each other, or people just calling each other ugly. Oh, and one from the US, just to show I'm not biased, a Walmart employee was crushed, then trampled to death by a throng of shoppers who then shopped around his body despite the pleas of his horrified co-workers.

All those stories are in today's news and I didn't even have to look in the tabloids, so Christ knows what's in there. I should make a special mention about the Guardian though which didn't seem to have any of this kind of story. Must have been an off day, but well done anyway.

Now the overwhelming feeling you'd get is the people out there are all bastards. Step outside your door and you'll probably be happy slapped, urinated on (happy slashed?), called ugly and given a pork pie for your your trouble while a mob of disinterested shoppers buys cheap goods around your dying body. Well, maybe not all that - but you're certainly left feeling that there are loads of horrible tossers lurking round every corner waiting to molest you.

But of course this isn't our daily experience of people. In general people are pretty decent to each other and when things go badly wrong, for most of us, most of the time, these stand out precisely because they are not our overwhelming experience of other people.

I'm not talking about the idea that we should all post good news and forget about the miserable stuff, it's more about the misanthropic world outlook this kind of relentless barrage of vilification does. I know someone being really nice to a stranger probably isn't as newsworthy as when they punch them and kill their goldfish, but it happens more often and maybe there should be something more, ummm, positive in the press about what normal people are like.

How are we meant to build up a feeling of community with each other if the press is forever reveling in the details of this or that gruesome case? Should we just stop reading the news altogether? Maybe.

I suppose that's what stories about Tom Jones and Halle Berry are meant to be to some extent - stories without any "bad guy". But then they are part of the special people aren't they? Are the ordinary citizens of the world only going to come to the attention of the press when they behave like animals or when they get "recognised" by the Queen?

Perhaps stories about how crap the world is are just more interesting. I've had a look at the last twenty posts on this blog to test that theory. Nine were positive stories, six negative, one a call for action (which is kind of both) and four weren't really one camp or the other. Actually, that's a better score than I thought I'd get before I started counting, I must be getting less grumpy as I get older.

Mind you, I'm worried this comes across like a call for vacuous feel good stories about little girls who help their neighbour's three legged dog or something - it really isn't - but it just feels like ordinary people only get mentioned in the press when they're being fuck-knuckles. It creates a bad impression is all I'm trying to say, we're really not that bad.