Editorial: Influence Positive or Negative (2024)

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• Editorial: Influence Positive or Negative

• August 26, 2022

• By Greenwich Sentinel
• Editorials, Opinion Pieces, ZApp Highlights

Welcome back! We hope everyone enjoyed their time away this summer. We were able to sneak away during part of our annual two-week hiatus and were fortunate enough to witness the August Supermoon from a boat off the coast of Maine. Now we are back, and the paper is in production.

One thing we try to do during the course of the year is visit all of our houses of worship. They are a vital element of our community and an important part of our paper. This past week we visited with Pastor Nathan Hart of Stanwich Church. These visits are always inspirational, as well as aspirational. They help reaffirm the mission of the paper and give us ideas going forward.

In our discussion with Pastor Hart, we heard many exciting things that are happening at Stanwich Church, and we talked about what we can do to help our community collectively as well as separately. And we talked about influence.

Each of us influences others, whether we know it or not. We do not mean like a social media influencer who is 18 years old and trying to sell a beauty product. More subtle. You do not need to be a person of influence to be influential. For many, the most influential people are probably not even aware that they are. Influence can be either positive or negative. The question becomes if each of us influences others are we doing so positively or negatively?

We are continuously inundated with negative content, whether it is from the evening news, alerts on our devices or click bait from local blogs. It is tiring. It is exhausting and it weighs on our psyche. We can see it and feel it as we go about town. People are angry, frustrated, and quick to be rude in situations that do not call for it.

Really it is no wonder, we have COVID fatigue, inflation fatigue, war fatigue and fatigue on and on. We are letting our spheres of influence be consumed by all the negative out there and that only feeds on itself creating more negative. It is known that we as individuals are influenced by our own thoughts. Negative thoughts limit mental and emotional growth, while positive thoughts inspire and influence the way we live our lives.

What can we do about it? Be positive of course. But sometimes this is hard to do. It can be easier to let the negative sink in and live inside of us. We must work hard to push it aside and let the positive take its place and it is worth it. It is something that we, as a paper, believe in very strongly. In fact, it is a major reason that we started the paper over seven years ago. We felt that Greenwich was becoming too fractured, its news delivery too negative. We felt that an honest delivery of the news devoid of biased reporting and click-bait stories was what our community wanted, and it has worked.

Then the pandemic sent us all backwards. However, now that it is over, we need to work harder to get back to where we were before it started mentally (and for some probably physically too). We need to push all the toxic negativity out and open ourselves up to positive.

Just think of all the good we could do if we used our individual spheres of influence for positive. What we do does not need to be large actions. Hold the door for the person behind you. Don’t honk at someone on the Avenue. Smile more, frown less. Laugh. Say hello to a stranger. These are very real steps we can all take that will make us feel good and others as well. It will be a start to helping our community come back from the negative.

Thank you, Pastor Hart for your time this week.

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