What does one tell the children about the world in which they are living, if not yet taking a full part?

Wasn’t it the Soviet publication, Pravda, or Truth, that with text and pictures told everyone, children and parents (who were treated like children) about any number of good things that were happening all the time, it being somehow understood, even by the Soviets, that “life is good.”

Pravda would write about “events” such as the entire farm family, parents and children, friends and neighbors, somewhere in the farm belt all working happily together to bring in the harvest; such as the students would pay rapt attention in a Moscow classroom, all trying to be the first to be recognized with the answer to the teacher’s question; such as the test pilot somewhere in Siberia brought his plane safely down to the ground after reaching a record height.

By only describing in Pravda and others of their publications the way things should be, the way they, and probably we also, wanted things to be, were the Soviets, at least in this one respect, somehow closer to the truth, about what life is all about?

Hard work, discipline, courage, grit, accomplishment, all that sort of thing. In short, character. Those things they and we wanted for our children, but we different from they rarely if ever show them examples of that life we want them one day to live themselves.

The truth about our lives, at least as conveyed in our media, seems to be something else entirely, the sort of things I read about in our own publications, the things I see on our TV screens, day after day. For example, the news items I take from today’s Daily Beast and have copied and pasted below. Is this “line-up” representative of the truth about our lives we want to tell our children. I don’t think so, yet we tell them little else. They see little else in our news media.

I guess I do believe that the daily Pravda and not the daily Beast was closer to what our lives are most about, to what life is, or should be. For if not, if the world is like the Beast implies by its choice of news items, what then we will tell our children as they begin to read these things for themselves? That this is the truth about our world?

Do we even know anymore the truth about our world? And why as things are would the children want to become a part of the world?
Why would they not drop out?

Anyway, here’s a day’s snapshot of our world according to the Beast, what they call, “Must Reads From All Over.” Must reads??

OK for the eyeball of the giant squid.

Shot Pakistani Girl Stable

A team of neurological specialists currently treating wounded Pakistani teen activist Malala Yousafzai say that her condition is stable, but “the next 36 to 48 hours are important.” Yousafzai, who was shot in the neck for defending girls’ right to attend school, is currently on a ventilator at a hospital in Rawalpindi. Although medical tests on the 14-year-old have gone well, she remains in critical condition. Afghan schools began Saturday with a special day of prayer for Yousafzai—two days after armed men attacked a girls’ school in the Bamyan province in central Afghanistan.

Body Belongs to Jessica Ridgeway

The weeklong search for 10-year-old Jessica Ridgeway ends with a grisly find in a park a few miles from the fifth-grader’s home.

Meningitis-Linked Firm Broke Regulations

The New England Compounding Center in Massachusetts allegedly sold drugs to physicians without requiring patient names or proof of prescription in addition to soliciting bulk orders of their products. The contaminated medication associated with the outbreak is a steroid from the company, which has put as many as 14,000 people at risk.

Shot Fired into Obama Campaign Office 

Nobody was injured.

Al Qaeda Leader Urges Holy War 

Over anti-Muslim film ‘Innocence of Muslims.’

Masked Men Storm Moscow Gay Bar 

Four hospitalized after attack.

Florida Reporter’s Body Found

Body was encased in concrete

Huge Eyeball Likely Giant Squid’s 

The body part was found washed ashore in Florida.