The economy, layoffs, bankruptcy, the stock market, the housing crisis and the bailout.  Turn on your TV and tune into CNN, FOX, HLN and if you don’t hear one of these topics within 10 minutes call me and I’ll buy you a cookie.  Ill even spring for one with macadamien nuts in it.   Everywhere you turn you hear how bad and how scary it is out there.  Tonight I tuned into Dave Ramseys’ Town Hall for Hope and for once, I heard what I’ve been screaming all along.  Yes, we are in the midst of a recession, but it is not the end of the world, so if your a heathen you can stave off that death bed conversion for one more day.

I’m not trying to trivialize the economy right now.  I am seeing 4 times the amount of bankruptcy’s this year that I saw last year.  But I think most of what your seeing is driven out of fear.  People are afraid, and they are afraid because its all that they see.  Once upon a time, when the world was in black and white, before HD and Color-Vision, we found out what to think from the trusty newspaper.  We gathered round the fire and read what was going on out in that big scary world.

When I was a child, Mom and Dad watched the news after I had gone to sleep.  They might discuss what they had heard or read at work or church, but it was a topic of conversation, not a focal point.  The news now is everywhere, 24 hours a day on tv, twitter, facebook, this blog or your iphone.  When the people that are constantly feeding us our news become scared and uninformed, they become part of the fear monster.  When your hear all these stories that the economy is in a downfall, that houses are foreclosing like State fans lose teeth, they cease to be topics of conversation and become focal points of fear and stress.

It was refreshing to hear tonight that I am not alone in this view, that someone else thinks that its not all going down the drain.  That we should tune out and pitch in.  Hope is what we make it, Hope is what America does best, it is what will get us out of this problem.  Listening to these media outlets constantly preach gloom and doom will only bring you down into the fray.  And here’s the shameless plug.  If you think you’ve got it bad, if you think your headed down the path to becoming a statistic that feeds this fear machine, then come in, lets talk.  Let’s see if you are.  There are few problems that can’t be solved, but you cant solve anything if you ignore it and wait for your bailout bill.

If you need hope then help someone that needs it.  It can feed and grow just as fast as fear.