Good News Found

Maybe because I work on a campus, the reporting on the recent shooting drew me in. Sometimes it's as if I belong to the Church of the Holy Fact. I still have this belief that if I just uncover the right fact, the key piece of data, then somehow everything will make sense and the problems of the world will become solveable. The more nonsensical the problem, the more this belief moves me to seek facts.

Anyway, this belief lead me to watch last night's NBC news special against my better judgement. They did everything that hateful maudlin TV journalism does except create a cheesy logo for the story (I guess they didn't have time). They replayed the same footage over and over. They compared the shooting to other shootings, assigning it the winning rank. They dragged out victims of similar crimes to ask what they felt. They almost got a police officer from another part of the country to say that the local police failed. The charismatic anchors said sensitive words of thanks to the EMS workers. Worst of all was the tracking beauty shot of the weapons that were probably used. It was enough to shake me out of the Church of the Holy Fact.

So I turned instead to another fact source, Edens Lost & Found. This program restored my belief that people can use facts to solve problems, at least some of the time.