years ago, while working for a state-owned newspaper in China, I was hired as an editor to increase circulation. the newspaper was typical of state-run papers at the time, where good news was to dominate the front pages and the bad, pushed to the back pages. to set the tone of the nation, my boss would lament. this is our job. it did not sell papers, but served a need in the philosophy of the state at the time. an idealist idea of news.

but to sell papers we need to put something on the front that captures the readers attention. something sexy, something with a bit of bite and drama. something bad. in the west, we are used to the front page stories to carry the news of drama, wars, famine or strife. the good stories, normally sports related, are buried in the back. we argued back and forth and finally we got to try out one issue where we would flip the dialogue. we ran with a story one of the reporters had found about homeless kids working in a gang-related environment selling flowers for a group of people that hired them from their parents. it was a good read, full of the bad side of mankind. a few days after it was released my boss found some trouble for the risk taken, I was subsequently let go and the issue was forgotten.

i recall his conversation, his arguments and his theories. focus on the good, it is for the nation. start with a good story, start with what is going right. even if the bad is all we really want to see. i would still argue, for the sake of selling papers, that we had to put something in the front that grabs the readers attention. but his argument of starting out with the good, for the sake of the nation, still resonates in me and I find the merits of his argument something that I believe in more and more as time moves on.

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to change the dialogue and not think about the things that bother us. this is a great goal that can be focused on and somewhat acheived. something to practice as life moves forward. to be in another place and another space rather then the world at its present time. to marvel at the goodness of it all, rather then at what makes it all bad? 

grades post for our son, we focus on the lowest of them. projects are running well, but the one project that is stuck gets all the attention. give a long speech, stumble once and that is the point that it remembered. the bad employee, the mold on the otherwise white wall, these get the grease. play around this anomaly, look the other way. if you can.