You wake up on a raw and rainy morning. Your mind and body tell you to stay in bed, yet some sort of awful force pushes you out. You already feel defeated before you turn on the TV news and see these headlines.

"Armed robbery in donut shop in Wilkes-Barre""Arson investigation in Lackawanna County""Child molester sent to prison""60-year-old man assaulted in Bloomsburg"So here's your breakfast menu: a plate filled with robbery and fire, along with a side order of molestation and violence, and it's served up on your table before you have poured your first cup of coffee.As a newspaper journalist, I can appreciate that you and I can pick and choose what we want to read, but if we turn on the TV news and don't even watch, a voice of doom and gloom still drives the sordid details of daily disaster right through our eardrums.Then we take a peek at the screen. The same newswoman who announces the horror stories of the day with a somber expression changes her face to a happy smile in a heartbeat when she transitions from "Four die in a car crash" to "Great-grandma celebrates 100th birthday."The questions that arise concerning the media's saturation of its viewers with act after act of inhumanity are perplexing. Do these incidents desensitize us or do they shock our moral conscience?Do we say, "Oh well, there's another child raped," or "Oh my God, there are pedophiles living in our neighborhood."The TV media stays true to a policy that if it bleeds, it leads. Feel-good stories are put on the back burners. After they hammer us on the head with half an hour of death and destruction, they try to enlighten our senses with one or two minutes of levity.If I could broadcast the news, I'd make an attempt to show that the world has as much good in it as it does evil. Here's my short, and satirically insensitive report.Man dies from a tree fall, the same tree a fireman rescued a cat from last year.Woman drowns in lake where a 12-year-old boy caught a trophy 6-pound bass on a rubber worm an hour earlier.Man with knife chases wife into a Wawa store where someone just won $5,000 from a lottery scratch-off ticket.Angry Little League parent beats up umpire after a great game in which the Red Sox defeated the Angels on a walk-off home run by 9-year-old Eddie Mathews. Three are wounded in a shooting at a school where state test scores have risen by an incredible 60 percent. And finally, an entire shore town is destroyed by a hurricane, but tomorrow's forecast calls for sunny skies and ideal ocean swimming temperatures at what's left of the ravaged beach.In the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau wrote, "If we hear of one man robbed or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one mad dog shot, and we never hear about another - one is enough."I think Thoreau was right. Reports of two atrocities are one too many. They become like flies, buzzing at our ears, seeking to distract us from our daily quests for personal happiness.If someone says to me, "I saw on the news that this guy killed four people with a hunting knife," I'm going to respond, "That reminds me. Cabela's has knives for 50 percent off. I have to get there before the sale ends."Seriously, if we consume the TV news every day, we might be too afraid to come out of our houses. We could get attacked by an escaped criminal, described as armed and dangerous, and was last seen in our local shopping mall. We might also be killed in a car crash because the weather report is predicting damaging lightning and winds that may knock down power lines and trees.An old proverb says, "What you don't know can't hurt you."So I won't watch the TV news anymore.Instead, I'll get in my car, turn on the radio, and listen to relaxing music while I drive toward the mall during a spectacular thunderstorm.Rich Strack can be reached at

katehep11@gmail.com.