Gwen’s Take: Turning bad into good

I am in the bad news business. Seldom do I get to report on puppies, rainbows or the sounds of children giggling. Well, never.

If there is anything good to be said about my particular line of work, it’s that we get to tell people the news they need to hear, and to put it in context.

To get to that — for one hour every night on the PBS NewsHour, and for an additional half-hour every Friday night on Washington Week, we have to slog through a lot of tough stuff.

We talk to the incarcerated, the drug addicted, the politicians and the policy makers, plus we sit through hours of speeches and committee hearings.

We do this so you don’t have to.

And, occasionally, we glean from you that it’s appreciated. NewsHour executive producer Sara Just received a note this week from viewer Robbie Schaefer, a guitarist, blogger and founder of OneVoice, a program that brings children together through music. We wrote about his program in 2013.

It’s worth it to reprint some of this latest blog here:

Last night my wife and I watched the PBS NewsHour as we do most evenings around 6pm. My youngest son was with us for dinner, so he was watching as well. There was a story about Syrian immigrants waiting and walking in the pouring rain in their struggle to cross Slovenia and Croatia on their way to hopeful asylum in Germany. There was a story about continuing violence between Palestinians and Israelis, including the brutal death of an Eritrean man who was an innocent asylum seeker. He had been mistaken for a terrorist, shot by an Israeli policeman and then kicked and beaten by the crowd while bleeding on the ground. Rage unhinged. Fear will lead us there every time. There was U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, like a decades old recording, calling for an end to the “senseless violence.”

It was enough to ruin your night.

Part of me wanted to turn it all off, make dinner, pet my dogs, watch playoff baseball. A bigger part of me couldn’t. This is the world we live in. All it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing. And yet, that familiar feeling of helplessness washed over me. I could see it on the faces of my wife and son as well. I got angry. Angry at the world for being this f***ed up. Angry at someone else’s reality intruding on my perfectly comfortable suburban evening. Angry at myself for being angry. And, in short order, anger slid into despair. What to do? Where to start? A facebook posting (or a blog) masquerading as activism is not enough. Not even close.

And that’s when there was a knock on the door.

We live at the end of a cul-de-sac, and this being dinnertime, knocks on the door are uncommon. Isn’t that one of the thin veils we invent to convince ourselves that there is order and civilization in our lives? We don’t interrupt people at dinnertime. Yeah, it’s polite, but it’s also a load of s**t. It turns out an interruption was precisely what was called for here. I opened the door, and there stood Emma, our neighbor’s 8-year-old daughter, with her red Flyer wagon waiting behind her on the sidewalk. There was something about that wagon. Still. Expectant. She explained that she was collecting supplies for people in South Carolina who had lost their homes and most of their belongings in the recent flooding.

Wow. I’d forgotten about that. It was, like, two weeks ago. How quickly I’d moved on from one instance of human suffering to the next.

Toothpaste, toilet paper, shampoo, paper towels. She was going to South Carolina with a group from her school to deliver these things in November. It would be her birthday while she was there, she explained, and she was sad that she wouldn’t be able to have a regular birthday party here at home, but at least two of her friends would be with her and maybe that would be alright.

Emma is the answer.

There’s more. You can read all his blog entries here.

Schaefer’s appeal is in the end a positive one. We need to know what’s happening in the world, but we cannot afford to shrug and walk away.

If we shrug, we don’t get to pick our leaders. If we walk away, we lose out on the interconnectedness that explains our world.

So I’m going to stick that one in my hatband, and set out to tell the stories that shed light and spur action. That way, the bad news can take us to something good.