I recently saw a snippet of an interview with actor Denzel Washington where he talks about the media. “If you don’t read the news,” he says, “you’re uninformed. And if you do read the news, you’re misinformed.” There’s a lot of truth in that statement. However, it’s one thing to read the news as an endless litany of the day’s evils all over the world, and quite another thing to seek out those media that offer in-depth, thoughtful news coverage of trends that shape the world. In the latter type, there is more information on the trends that shape events rather than on sensational local events with no geopolitical significance. Social media is not all bad. In fact, like most technology, good or bad depends on how you use social media and whether you feed off it indiscriminately or choose to sip from the nourishing bits on offer. Gandhi apparently once said: life is like a mirror; if you smile at life, it will smile back at you. Keeping that in mind, go ahead and read news roundups of the year 2016, which has been a pretty horrible year.

But remember that mirror and keep smiling for 2017. Here are some things that the daily news stories do not say. Or if they do, not as headline news but only buried on an inside page. Below is a post by stalwart statistician Hans Rosling that shows unmistakeable positive trends in the world today. I encourage you to sample at least a few minutes of it, and if you’re hooked, there are plenty more by him on YouTube.

I suspect that most of the people who voted for Brexit and the current US President-elect are unaware of the basic facts illustrated by this lecture. In an earlier blog, I cited a quote by Karl Menninger that said: attitudes are more important than facts. Very true, but if facts are accepted to be true they can help to change attitudes. Whatever the year 2017 brings, there will certainly be a lot of surprises, so don’t forget to smile at the mirror of life.

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