News of the Weird

The front page looks increasingly like the cover of the Weekly World Wide News.

Ice storms in Atlanta. A captive killer whale kills its trainer. Catfight among Olympic ski team divas. Champion golfer gives up sport, checks in to sex rehab clinic for three-month stay. President enlists Batboy to spearhead new healthcare effort. Okay I made up the last part. I don't think even Batboy could get healthcare reform passed in Congress. Unless maybe he ate about 800 medical lobbyists.

The news is increasingly weirder and more extreme. There are events everyday that make you tilt your head and go, "huh? Really?" Truth has always been stranger than fiction, and now it is stranger still. Homerun champion Mark McGwire, an admitted steroid user, is now the hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals. His brother has written a tell-all book. Andrew Young, former campaign manager for John Edwards, reveals Edwards convinced him to tell the world that he, not Edwards, was the father of Rielle Hunter's love child. The deception and arrogance is stunning, but Young has it all on tape. He too wrote a tell-all book. So many tell-alls have been written, the confessions are no longer shocking. Ted Haggard, minister to millions, is brought down by a scandal involving meth and gay sex, after years of being an outspoken critic of homosexuality, addiction and drug use.

What does all this prove, or say about us? Why do we love train wrecks, the sensational, the extreme. the bizarre and unbelievable? Why do we find it everywhere?

In truth, there is nothing new under the sun. A few thousand years King David of Israel spotted a hot chick bathing on a roof, started a torrid affair with her, and sent her husband to the front to die so he could have her for his own. Ambition and arrogance are nothing new. Great men, and men who craved high places, have risen and fallen since the beginning of time.

As humans we are fascinated by stories like these because we are mystified and horrified by them. We have the innate sense that within ourselves there is the capacity to be loving, kind, wise and hopeful, and there is also the powerful compulsion to be greedy, grasping, vile and selfish. We watch this war play out in the lives of others, and shake our heads at their sad fates, secretly grateful we never ascended so high or got exposed so completely.

There is none righteous, no, not one. We're all capable of terrible things. We've all contemplated them, and had moments we'd die to have exposed. Our lives are messy, unbelievably fleeting, often sordid and sad.

But we have our moments of grace. We have our hopes, our lovely tender thoughts, and each other. The other day our grand daughter Bryce was drawing with crayons on typing paper at the kitchen table. Grandma had made her a snack. Bryce is a delightful, amazing child. Her very presence creates a calm, a hopefulness, a tender quiet in the room. She was talking to us as she drew. "This is me, and momma, and sister. This is a family. Families are always there for you, and they never leave." She is four years old, a wonderment and an unending joy.

Part of our fascination with the news of the weird is relief that our worries our ordinary and the challenges that fragment our families are surmountable and small. We don't have a love child stashed in a half million dollar house. Our spouses have not been eaten by killer whales or hauled up to die at swordpoint. Most of the time, the crises we face are controllable.

And when the wrenching and insurmountable come our way, as they inevitably do, we have our family. And families never leave.