By Dr. Anthony Policastro

Many people remember having their newspaper delivered to their house on a daily basis. There were not many choices for most people.

Media now comes at us from all directions. There are 24-hour news stations. There is Meta. People communicate on X, Snapchat, What’s App and other methods. Newspapers are now online (and the Star is still delivered once a week).

Unfortunately, with all that competition, there is a need for sensationalism to grab the readers’ attention. I have seen a number of headlines suggesting something big was happening, only to find out it was much ado about nothing. The result is that it is difficult to know what is real. The news might be true. It might be exaggerated. There might be misleading headlines to grab your attention.

The question is, what does the average individual do to sort through all of this? Back in the 1920’s, an American theologian named Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a short prayer as the closing to one of his sermons. It was later adopted as one of the mottos of Alcoholics Anonymous. That is why most people are familiar with it.

It is known as The Serenity Prayer. There are several different versions. However, one of the more common ones is: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

One of its aims is to help reduce anxiety. There are many headlines that are upsetting. Some of them affect us in a minor way. Some affect us in a more serious manner. However, for most of them, there is nothing we can do to change the headline. Therefore, developing anxiety about its impact will not solve anything. It will just make us nervous for no good reason.

Every now and then, there is something that we can change. When that happens, we can take action to actually lessen the anxiety.

I was in the Air Force for 20 years. I served under five presidents in that time from Gerald Ford to Bill Clinton. Each of them was Commander-in-Chief. Each of them made decisions that impacted the military. However, in most cases, those decisions had little effect at the level of most individuals.

There was one exception. I was the Hospital Commanding Officer at Langley AFB in August of 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. I sent 147 of my people off to Desert Shield/Desert Storm. The goal was to remove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait. When that goal was reached, the war came to an end. President George H.W. Bush returned my 147 people safe and sound. His decision to not invade Iraq further saved lives.

I will be forever grateful for the way President Bush took care of my people. However, it was one of those things I could not change.

I have written before about the fact that when I arrived at Langley AFB, the annual inventory of our Air Transportable Hospital was done by 28 people over a six week period. Only 14 of them were actually assigned to deploy with the hospital in case of war. I had all 128 individuals do the inventory in April 1990. They were ready to safely deploy five months later.

I had to recognize that it was something I could change for the better.

Despite concerns that the hospital could not run for two weeks without 128 people. It actually ran fine. It also did so during Desert Shield because we had learned that it could. Those 128 people and the 19 person decontamination team all returned home safely.

Maybe my knowing the difference, as suggested in the Serenity Prayer, was just accidental. However, I did realize that there were some things I could change, and some things I could not. Hopefully, in the process I decreased both my anxiety and that of those around me.

I suspect, given our current new news processes, things might have worked out very differently in today’s world.