There
is good news to report from Lindsay, my adopted home town – more, in fact, than
has been making the pages of the newspapers.
I have been thinking a lot about
what makes for good news. The sun came up this morning. That’s good news in two
ways. It’s “good” because it’s
beneficial: this thing we need even more than food and shelter, this thing we
count on so desperately that we take it for granted, has happened yet one more
day. It’s also good because it’s
true. It doesn’t matter which day you
read this, it is still true. If it were
false – if it hadn’t happened – you wouldn’t be reading this.
So truth, as well as benefit, are
criteria for good news. I think
“wholeness” is a third: a sense of being complete (as much as someone can know
the whole story at any given time;) a sense of being thorough, examined from
all sides. Not just the sunny side; not
just the dark side. Both sides. News from only one side of a story is a
half-truth, which leaves much too much room for truth’s opposite.
There was good news to report from
the Oct. 27th Lindsay City Council meeting, but all the papers
missed it. The forces behind the current
city administration had taken advantage of the power of the so-called social
media (which, with its lack of accountability, might better be called
“anti-social,”) to spread the rumor that the city council wanted to shut down
the McDermont Field House. The rumor, of
course, pinpointed the three councilmembers who have been charged with
everything from dysfunctionality to conspiracy (not to mention the false charge
and arrest for felony embezzlement of Councilman Mecum a year and a half ago,)
which was not good news under any of my three criteria, above. That’s what I mean by lack of
accountability. It was bad.
How this bad news got converted into
good news had a touch of gospel in it.
Our mayor, Ramona Padilla, with all her education, compassion and
humanity, took that bull by the horns and said, essentially, “We are not going
to be gored by this.” She called it by
its true name – a falsehood, a rumor intentionally spread to make real
conversation impossible about the problem of making McDermont a financially
responsible part of this city – and then asked each councilmember to say
whether or not they had ever mentioned the possibility of closure. Not one had.
By taking control of that ill wind
at the very beginning of the meeting, she turned what could have been just
another public brawl into a real community conversation about the problems and
opportunities of that facility. It went
on for almost an hour, which was not bad since it was at least five years
overdue, if not ten. She took full
advantage of the collection of interested people who had gathered to protest,
and turned them into willing participants in shaping our future, looking for
ways to make that albatross fly. (Albatrosses can fly, you know – they don’t have to just hang around your neck.)
Did you read that story
anywhere? I didn’t.
And what a lost opportunity that
was. Here the real media could have
carried some good news, something readers are always clamoring for. Instead, they have chosen to characterize the
current struggle to make better budgets, better rules, better public relations,
better balances of power – they are characterizing this as dysfunctional, as
“not able to agree on anything.” It’s
the same blindness that characterized past councils’ rubber stamp work as
progressive. It’s bad news.
Bad enough to make me not want to
read the newspaper.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a born reader who writes for a life, not a living. You can send her your observations of good
news c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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