A few months ago, amid another weekend of little to do and by myself once again, I turned on the television one Sunday morning, expecting to surf through the channel guide and hopefully find a movie I wanted to watch. The channel was already on CBS and that morning, CBS Sunday Morning was airing their anniversary special show. It was as if I was watching an introduction to the show and learning what it was all about. They had a lot stuffed into the 90 minute program that day and I found myself feeling better about life when it was over. I was excited to watch again.
And nearly every Sunday morning since then, I’ve woken up and watched all, or part, of CBS Sunday Morning. The “part” happens when I manage to sleep past the start time and tune in when I wake up.
I remember watching bits and pieces of the show over the last couple of decades, but somehow I had it stuck in my mind that it was just another news program designed to inflame our emotions, either to feel guilty or angry, just to incite someone else’s idea of change. But I was wrong. Sunday Morning somehow has managed to find a way to tell a story, some even political, without creating that inflammation of our emotions.
After all, inflammation of any kind can be detrimental to our health. The pharmaceutical commercials that air during Sunday Morning will tell us that joint inflammation causes damage along with pain. Wouldn’t that also be true of emotional inflammation? I know that’s how I feel watching other news programs. I feel angry and helpless and that leads to increased stress and depression.
Sunday Morning may air commercials for prescription drugs during the course of the show, but perhaps the show itself is a type of drug for other news shows. Sunday Morning is the aspirin to the news cycle headache. I finish watching the show and feel that I can move forward with my day as a regular human being.
Maybe calling Sunday Morning a “news program” is misleading. I think the better term would be “story program”. It might even be possible that it’s a grown-up version of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. It seems designed to tell us that there are regular people, special people, smart people, and nice people in the world. They present stories on celebrities and then they do stories like the one this morning about the man who mows the American flag into his front yard. They inform without judgement, something incredibly difficult to do for any of us and clearly impossible for every other news or journalistic program on television today.
Even with the occasional political story, which is the only negative that I have against the show, they manage to tread lightly and carefully. No one ever really seems to be painted into a corner as the “bad guy”. They don’t point fingers. This is critical for us to understand as a society. Life is neat when we can point a finger at someone and say “they are to blame for my pain”, but in reality, life doesn’t work that way. Typically the only one to blame for our pain is ourself. They bring the humanity back to those people whose voices have been lost in the sea of news network shouts. They let us see the person first and the information second, gently exposing our innate fallibility as human beings and allowing us space to feel compassion for other humans.
The joy in the show is that they discuss our collective issues and shed a little light on them, like the short segment this morning about how important a smile is and how our need to wear masks now takes away that form of communication. That sounds like a sad segment if it was just left at that, but then it goes on to talk about the importance of not only our words, but our tone and inflection, as if they are giving us a road map to solving the issue of our temporarily lost smiles. Many news programs report only the problems but with Sunday Morning, we are also left with the tools needed to address that problem.
I look forward to every Sunday Morning now, knowing that I get the opportunity to learn about other human beings via this show. I get the chance to make breakfast, sit quietly and slow my world down for 90 minutes, with the 90th minute always being a few seconds of nature to remind me that we share our planet.
Sunday Morning has been on the air since 1979. It has managed to stay consistent during its 40 plus years, valiantly dismissing the urges to become more sensationalized. I’ve mentioned to a couple of people this summer that I’ve really liked watching it and the response has been “oh, I love Sunday Morning”. I feel that I’ve missed out by only rediscovering it a few months ago.
If you’ve been like me and have missed out, I highly recommend tuning in and starting your Sunday morning off right by watching Sunday Morning.
(Note: Featured sun images are via CBSNews)
