The Day There Was No News

Though this “The Day There Was No News” video was on the popular site BoingBoing and thus many of you have seen it, I wanted it available on my blog and to add a comment about it here as I found it a bit haunting to watch the scrolling news ticker at the bottom as the montage of BBC news anchors, right before signoff, sit and wait to go off camera as though there was nothing to say!

What if there was no news but only positive visions of the future?

A friend of mine is building a new, change-the-world offering focused on kids (initially 5th and 6th graders) and is all about enabling them to build a positive, vision video about their life. While there are many benefits: kids learning to communicate in a video age; learning and using hosted applications to create it; storyboarding out their vision and assembling it into a finished video; it’s the essence of creating a vision video that is so powerful.

He and his team have enabled one school to date and I attended the in-school screening of the kids vision videos (there was an evening event too which I couldn’t attend). You should’ve seen the faces of those kids who’ve done a vision video and shared it with their classmates, teachers, school and parents! I didn’t even know these kids but connected with them on an emotional level as I looked at their hope-filled visions of the life they intend to create. It’s mind-blowing that these positive feelings, beliefs, and joyful dreams live inside these little bodies and few of us ever have a chance to see how kids envision their future lives.

The evening event had parents all choked up as they watched these vision videos. My friend told me that one mom of a disabled boy came up to him afterwards, tears streaming down her face, and told him that she had no idea he had those sorts of dreams and intentions wrapped up inside his being. “I’ll never look at him in quite the same way again,” she said with a mix of wonder and pride in her voice.

Nothing happens until a vision of an outcome, of the future, or of possibility appears, and it’s amazing when kids (or any of us) build a video that’s a vision for our lives. Our hopes and dreams, our vision of the world as it could be, shifts our thought patterns and slowly moves our thinking to then create what could be.

My friend’s vision is to have a “day” where kids all over the world show their videos of hope and possibility. Imagine that day, in a world where joy and hope is the focus and fueled by positive imagery, music, sound and visions of the future, being one where it’s “The Day There Was Only Hope.”