Patience is a virtlr€...

fllHer wAS wHAr My pARENTS taught me from a very early age. But I feel-and I perhaps chalk it up to the natural aging process-life at times seems to be moving too fast. Consequently, patience and tolerance levels are declining just as quickly. I cannot believe how much screaming and shouting goes on around me-especially on television and on line. In a world of Twitter (and it is time that went away, IMHO) this got-to-know-now, got-to-do-now world we live in makes me worry about the future.

Times have changed, and not all for the good. In the good old days, there were the weekends when that project around the home could take three months. Now it has to be finished the same weekend! At work, the project that would have taken weeks now has to be done by tomorrow. Dinner that used to be slaved over for hours now is out of a bag, oven to table, in 20 minutes. Kids eat dinner, play video games, and do their homework all at the same time, while rushing to the next outof-school activity. Everything has to be done now and instantaneously!

Much of the troubles our economy has gone through these past years can be blamed on the need for instant gratification, that regardless of whether it could be afforded or not, there was the need to have it now, rather than save for it.

We are living in a time that gets faster by the day, hour and minute. It's a world where a newsperson gets fired if another network gets on air with a breaking story a few minutes earlier. Sometimes even seconds are too long. I must admit my wife is always saying, "Hold on! I'll get to it in a few seconds when I finish the last thing you barked your orders for." Yes, it seems I have succumbed, too.

In the process, we have lost patience and tolerance. Patience is the ability to tolerate delay, and it seems that most of us are guilty of a lack of it. Our shortage of patience suggests our time and needs are more important than anyone else's. I'd like to think that I am better at it than in the past when someone jumped the line at the supermarket or cinema line. I let it go now, but maybe because people seem a lot meaner than they used to and you never know what they will pull from their pocket. When I get cut off on the highway, I just take a breath (or two, or three).

Maybe it is maturity, but today I am better at gauging how important something really is. So many times, I see people lose their tempers when, once out of that moment, minimal analysis would show that it really did not matter. Things that would have gotten my cheeks boiling not so long ago now do not. I find my stomach is no longer in the knots it used to be in.

Instead, look around you and marvel at our universe. Understand what is really important and learn to accept other's failings. Once you have serious illnesses around you, for instance, you renumber your priorities.

Lastly, looking at my own field, I am astounded at the decline of real journalism. It should alarm anyone of any intelligence. It's all brought about by the needto-know crowd. On television. news has been dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. Real thought and insight have been thrown out of the window for the sake of expediency. Editorial standards evaporate when "news" has to be published in seconds. And, yes, the biggest danger is that real editorial costs money and cannot be given away free. Because of that, our journalism has evolved into covering what some celebrity was wearing, instead of creating intelligent debates on the issues that face us. Serious journalism is in real decline. and we all should unreservedly lament this loss. How can you have an opinion when you have had no serious news to base your opinion on? Are we going to base our worldly opinions on the Huffington Post?

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