Tell anyone — anyone — who says there is nothing but bad news on evening television newscasts and in newspapers and that’s why they don’t watch or read news to shove off.
Tell them you have no time for their lazy assessment.
The nice stories, the make you feel good so your toes twinkle and your eyes water stories are there. You just have to look. Pay attention. And work hard to not let the hard news (what the Pollyannas and marketing hacks moaningly call bad news) imbed itself in your psyche and cloud your perspective.
The world, as any teenager with hormones can tell you, is a complicated place. A young adult leaving their teens and entering their 20s soon enough learns there are shades of gray in between the black and white realms of good and bad.
One reason the bad stories may resonate longer is because they present us with problems. They show what is wrong with us, our community and challenge us to do something about it.
Think stories exposing racism, bigotry and general hatred are new? They’re not.
Those episodes and occurrences have been around long before the first printing press and TV broadcast. And yet they persist because we have done nothing to solve them.
Same for corrupt politicians. And murderers. And scammers. And the general calamity and sometimes fatal chaos that is part of being on a planet hurling through space.
We cling to and recall those stories, perhaps, because they force us to address the faults and frailties we see in ourselves and others and maybe we can learn how to avoid similar pitfalls.
There is a lesson to be learned from hearing bad stories. Bad guys go to jail. And sometimes bad guys get away with bad deeds. How to avoid one particular fate may come from paying attention to how those stories played out and ended.
But what lessons do we learn from the nice stories? How do we benefit from reading a story about 14-year-old Kieler Muller being recognized as one of a few remarkable kids in the state or National City’s Victor Gonzalez who did what he could to help neighbors get by when they were temporarily out of work because of a government shutdown.
Other than a passing feeling of lightness and brief restoration in humanity’s inherent goodness, what lessons do stories like that provide us that lend themselves to survival? Maybe there is no lesson. Instead, maybe they are just reminders. That people can be kind.
The good stories are there. Every day, all day, every day. You just have to make an effort to look for them. Even if it means once a year looking back at all the things that happened in the world and community around you.
