Candace

Talmadge

Read Candace's bio and previous columns

October 15, 2007

Had Enough of Bad News? Send In an AngelScribe

Persian cats that swim – complete with their own YouTube video. A marriage proposal (happily accepted) folded into a Sunday news magazine’s crossword puzzle.

These small moments of blessed relief from “real world” news are brought to us by courageous souls who choose to affirm the goodness and joy that are all around us instead of being swallowed up by the unrelenting onslaught of negativity.

The persians belong to Mary Ellen Schesser, better known as AngelScribe (www.angelscribe.com), a pet advice columnist for the newspaper in her hometown of Cottage Grove, Oregon. Since 1996, Schesser has been e-mailing uplifting thoughts and true stories of love, heroism and miracles to tens of thousands of subscribers worldwide.

“I keep the words simple so they’re easy to translate,” Schesser explains. “I try to draw pictures in people’s minds.” She often receives e-mails from friends and readers with stories that originated in her newsletter and then circled the globe.

She was joined this past May by a website called Gimundo.com, devoted to finding and sharing good news from anywhere and everywhere. According to co-founder Chris Case, a Los Angeles television writer, Gimundo is the result of an after-dinner discussion about how people really long for something beside the nasty polemics and hype over trivia that consume the airwaves and the front pages.

“We try to watch what we put in our bodies,” Case points out. “Why not watch what we put in our minds?”

Indeed. Most news these days consists of unremitting violence and gore or insultingly trivial celebrity nonsense. Throw in nonstop major sports scandals, and the constant message that just about everybody is on the take and only fools play by the rules and care about others as well as themselves. It’s a mind-numbing, soul-destroying diet of destruction and distraction that saps the hope and spirits of the weak and strong alike.

The thinking that launched Schesser’s AngelScribe free newsletter was similar to the motivation behind Gimundo. More than a decade ago she was involved in the early Internet chat rooms but didn’t like the tone of the conversation. She also has always loved to elicit smiles from others. Thus was born the AngelScribe newsletter.

Surprisingly, many of Schesser’s readers are men who receive a forwarded copy, get hooked and become subscribers themselves. She cites e-mails from male readers who tell her, in essence, that they are kinder and gentler thanks to her e-mail efforts.

Case, a self-described media junkie, doesn’t advocate Gimundo as a replacement for news. “We should be well informed,” he emphasizes. Instead, Gimundo attempts to balance the torrent of bad news and vitriol. “It is a scary world and tough times, but focusing on the good will help people’s state of mind,” he says.

Bad news, alas, will always be with us. Yet there is refuge from the storm, provided we tear our gaze way from the train wreck and permit the alternatives to touch us where we live.

“When you come from the heart, you speak to the heart of others,” Schlesser says.

Amen to that, AngelScribe.

© 2007 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

Click here to talk to our writers and editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.

To e-mail feedback about this column, click here. If you enjoy this writer's work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry it.

This is Column #CT059. Request permission to publish here.