Murder. Betrayal. Corruption. Conspiracy. Affairs. Scandal. Tragedy. If you guess this is the front page of the daily news, good job. You are also right-on if you guessed the latest Hollywood hits. I would even give a passing grade for answering “The New York Times Best Seller List.”
In response to this rising subject-trend in news and media the audience tends to be separated into two groups. Some readers seem to bear the label “optimist” on smiling lips and shake their head at a corrupt media. Others, whose wallets are the ones encouraging this shadowy trend, eat this stuff up and arm themselves for the next edition. What is needed is a new breed, a people more aware of both the trends around them and the power of their own influence.
Writers and journalists long ago learned what sort of titles sell. Voices echoing something akin to “evil!” are attractive because buyers know what they need. To fill pages with “happily ever after” stories would not only risk deluding a public that has a right to know the true state of affairs, it might urge readers to build houses of straw in a day when bad wolves wait. Optimists shake their heads emphatically but their voices pull little weight.
“Pessimist” seems like too cruel a term to pin on the people who know to look out for the bad guys. Shouldn’t we be aware of drug-abusing neighbors like Harrell Johnson before we are left to find decapitated 3-year olds in the woods? Don’t you want to keep an eye out for pastors like Anthony Hopkins, whose butchered wife was found in his freezer? The list could go on and on – it already has in progress documented since the creation of the newspaper – and we should be in-touch enough with reality to have an eye ever watchful to catch those headed for crime before disaster strikes.
But there is another trend that moves forward unnoticed. In the wash of brutality, betrayal, and scandal on every front, no one can be blamed for going into self-preservation mode. It is a sad state of affairs when every optimistic smile is destined to be replaced by suspicious glances, and the people next door are no longer seen as neighbors but as strangers.
We say the media is educating us. If we let the fruit of that education be less trust and more fear, are we being fed from a tree of life or of certain death?
Neither faithless glances nor vapid smiles can turn this tide. A call to higher moral quality is demanded – characters with the soberness to recognize wrong all around and the hope to do something about it. Even the criminals read the bad news; then they go out and write it. Can there rise a people so committed to writing the good news?
People are taking the right steps. Such a group learned about Hurricane Ike and, not content merely to read the headlines, wrote them as 500,000 meals a day were donated to survivors. Another hero caught the two-year old daughter of Sherri Pinkerton after she fell twenty-five feet from a theme-park ride and equally to be honored are those who extended comfort to the distraught mother.
And let’s never forget cases like that of Elizabeth Smart, whose abduction made national headlines for months in 2002 and 2003. While such stories normally fade from the print as readers lose interest, tireless parents made every effort to keep Elizabeth in the mind of the public. These efforts were ultimately rewarded nine months later when citizens – citizens willing to do more than read the sad story – spotted kidnapper Brian Mitchell. Elizabeth was finally reunited with a family that had refused to give up hope.
We can choose to punctuate every sad story with a happy ending, but it won’t happen by simply watching for it. Think about what information is worth swallowing. As our actions show what we want to hear, let it be our smiles that write the news.
This was an undergrad college essay