As life throws curveballs and staggering headlines flood the media more than ever, GMP wants to know how you respond to negativity.
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Work, home and family can be stressful. It can be so stressful that we feel like we’re swimming in a sea of negativity with no lifejacket. At night, we come home to read about the latest criminal, drug deal, terrorist attack or social injustice in our newspapers. We often turn on the nightly news, just to be flooded with more negativity.
It’s almost as if negativity lurks at every turn–like it’s waiting to poison our minds and seep into our souls. We tell ourselves the journalists and reporters who write these toxic headlines and report on the top news stories every night are just doing their job. It’s likely why we turn the TV off, or post irritated, angry statuses on Facebook.
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Then, we turn around to find the unexpected knocking on our door–sickness, disease, financial debt, accidents. death. The list goes on and on. Society teaches us to move forward through our trials and tribulations, so much so that we push them down into our gut and try to justify the way we feel without even realizing we’re doing more harm than good–to ourselves and those around us.
It’s difficult to separate struggles at work, home or anywhere else when there are curveballs being thrown at you from all directions. At that point, the search for a response–be it negative or positive–becomes an individualized journey. You might even come face-to-face with a few demons on your journey, but you know they’ll continue to cloud your judgment until you respond.
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So, the burning question still remains: How do you respond? How do you respond to so much negativity that you feel as though you’re being buried alive?
Send your submissions to Erin Kelly, our Social Justice Editor, at [email protected]. Please review our submission guidelines on our website prior to sending your story, or send Erin an inquiry if you are a first-time contributor to GMP.
Thank you for being a part of the conversation no one else is having!
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Photo Credit: AlicePopkorn/Flickr
Erin, This is a great topic and I will submit an article. There are a great number of problems that we should attend to in our personal and community lives. Putting our heads in the sand and “thinking positive” just makes things worse. The think of the three big Es. Environmental stresses, Energy stresses (cheap oil is a thing of the past), and Economic stresses (what happens in Greece does not stay in Greece). We add 200,000 people to the planet ever day. Are you feeling crowded? But negativity also sells newspapers (well it would if we still had newspapers).… Read more »
Thanks, Jed! I look forward to reading your submission.
It is deeply disturbing to me that a woman is moderating this sort of discussion. That should not sound sexist, but I know that it does. Are men incapable of moderating, editing, and writing for a site called “The good men project” without the approval, tutelage, and/or permission of a member of the opposite sex? Are we (as men) so far gone that we do not trust ourselves enough to write and filter in an appropriate way? Or is it that we have no choice but to insert women into the equation out of fear? I doubt that this comment… Read more »