Good News and Bad News
Sunday, May 9th, 2010
- Girl helps choking friend thanks to ‘Spongebob’
A seventh grade girl saves her best friend who was choking on gum lodged in her throat during a good laugh by using the Heimlich maneuver she saw SpongeBob use on another cartoon character. - Dog honored for leading troopers to fire
Buddy, an untrained German Shepherd was hailed as a hero for saving a burning home by guiding state troopers through winding roads in Alaska to the scene of the fire. He got an engraved dog bowl and a rawhide bone.
Tina Valentino is the Editor/Publisher
Good news and bad news. If you type the words “good news doesn’t sell” into a Google search, an astounding 33,400,000 hits will come up. Yet even gloom-and-doom MSNBC and the fickle Today Show managed to find a smidge of airtime for the stories mentioned above when they were tipped off by the Associated Press. Make no mistake, I could have a “field day” with the injustice that goes on around us on a daily basis. There’s always a little Howard Beale voice inside of me from the 1976 movie Network that is dying to get out: I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job… banks are going bust… punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.
Bad news sells. Negativism has become the norm. People want to know what has gone wrong rather than what has gone right. For papers to publish “good news” rather than bad news is largely a waste of time. I pulled these sentiments from among the 33 million hits on Google—including this one: Good news is so common it doesn’t make the headlines anymore. Where? On the streets of New York where a homeless Good Samaritan bled to death on the sidewalk because no one called for help? Was it at the hospital where a 49-year old woman collapsed in the waiting room and ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ surveillance tapes showed workers walking around her for almost an hour—until she died?
Good news is common here, in Neighbors magazine. People really do want to know about the town that went without its own grocery store for more than two decades; about the volunteer spirit at Gottlieb Hospital; about the Mutt Show, where they can celebrate man’s un-purebred best friend; about businesses owned by hard-working “moms and pops” who go the extra mile; about the martial arts instructor who wants to spare your child from being bullied; about North Riverside’s Mother of Mothers Shrine, where anyone can just “sit quietly and pray” in this bad news world.
One person commented in the Google search, “Wouldn’t it be better if we were exposed to more good news?” Yes! We have taken the road less traveled by, to be sure, but good news deserves a home and it has one here. And, just as good news is often dismissed, too often are our veterans. If you can fly a Blackhawks, Cubs, Sox, Polish, Packers, Bears, Mexican or Italian flag, you can buy and fly an American flag, too, for veterans have given us the ultimate in good news: our freedom.
