Teen Angel

I would love to see the day when newspaper reporters were required to steep themselves in the literature of near-death experiences before they could write about tragedies. Perhaps then we the people would get a more balanced view, or at least a less melodramatic one.

Newspapers generally follow the “scientific” view that death kills us. Lights out. Nothing is left. Face reality.

So newspaper reporters, following that journalistic paradigm of reporting reality-based news, never even consider the possibility that there may be more dimensions to life than the purely physical.

This goes on day after day despite a growing mountain of research on near-death experiences (and the mountain would grow much grander if anyone would put some serious money into researching it.) Day after day reporters doing their journalistic duty keep feeding us soap operas disguised as news.

Today’s offering milks the soap opera emotions in a story about a teenage girl killed in a car wreck on the way to her school prom.

The reporter, Crystal Bolner of Salem, Oregon’s Statesman Journal gives us a lot of tears in her account of some young people painting a railroad trestle where the teenager was killed to improve the sharp turn’s visibility and hopefully save some lives.

The father of the dead girl shed tears in the story. A girlfriend “returned her tear-stained eyes to painting over the graffiti. She painted the underpass wall vigorously, almost in an attempt to whitewash over the pain of losing her friend.”

The young driver in whose car his prom date lost her (physical) life was also portrayed as lamenting about getting separated from a pack of cars driving to the event. “He wondered, had he been following the other cars, whether he would have slowed down near the underpass. Might the accident never have happened? A thousand ‘what ifs’ played through his mind.”

Many people, including many in the medical community, regularly pooh-pooh all this talk about near-death experiences as being anything but brain bunk. They believe that a dying brain puts on a great show, that’s all.

I am startled at how many people find that more believable and comforting than a bunch of amazing accounts of what others have experienced during their out-of-body adventures. Many people seem to want to cling to the idea that there’s nothing after death.

A personal friend of mine was involved in a near-fatal car crash many years ago. She says that she was out of her body before her head hit the windshield.

A few months ago I was in Seattle when David Beckman, a seasoned journalist, told around a hundred people at an IANDS meeting (International Association for Near-Death Studies) about his near-death experience. He had a complete life review while the rushing current of class-five rapids was battering his body against granite boulders.

As an independent entity, each separate story I hear may sound unbelievable, but when there are so many accounts available, with so many similarities, it begins to make one wonder. That’s why I would love to see news reporters exposed to this stuff.

But I don’t expect that to happen anytime soon. We’d rather scare ourselves with tragic stories than consider the possibility than life is far more incredible than we give it creadit for.