If you believe the world is going to hell in a handbasket, there’s plenty of supporting evidence. Natural disasters, war, crime, poverty, political and racial division – open a newspaper or turn on cable news and you can find stories to back the claim.
But if you believe people are fundamentally good – and that this is an amazing time to be alive – that’s a pretty easy case to make, too.
Confirmation bias – the human tendency to interpret information in a way that conforms to existing beliefs – often influences the way people consume news. If you think most news is bad news, you will be more likely to overlook the stories that don’t fit that narrative, and vice versa. Take a look, for example, at the past few editions of the Monitor.
Saturday’s headlines were tailor-made for the hell-in-a-handbasket crowd: two crime stories and a report on rising traffic fatalities in the state dominated the front page. It didn’t get much better on the inside pages: more crime, more crashes. There was little for the life-is-good people to cling to on this particular day, other than two beautiful photo packages, one of a rehabilitated peregrine falcon being released near Horseshoe Pond in Concord and another documenting a celebration of New Hampshire’s Bhutanese and Hindu communities, also in Concord.
Monday’s paper was different.
Monitor columnist Ray Duckler introduced readers to a little boy in Concord named Bodhi, who is battling spinal muscular atrophy, and Mike DeGagne, the family friend who is climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money for a cure.
Reporter Ella Nilsen wrote about a Love Your Neighbor gathering, which the Greater Concord Interfaith Council organized to help local Muslim families feel more welcome in the city.
The headline “Concord comes in 4th place” could have signaled bad news – but not when you’re talking about a ranking among state capitals. What does Concord need to do to bump Montpelier, Vt., out of the top spot? Better dining and entertainment – and we believe the city is on the right path in that regard (especially, as we’ve said many times before, if Concord’s beautiful river becomes a bigger part of the equation).
Open up Monday’s paper and you learn from the Granite Geek himself that the state has an abundance of firewood as autumn approaches. And in the sports section, we celebrate the champions of the Little League World Series, the first team from the United States to win it since 2011.
We were dismayed, however, to read that New England’s population of wild blue mussels has declined by 60 percent over the past four decades. We also lament the loss of KFC on the Heights, although we’re happy that the detour to a bucket of Extra Crispy is a short one, just down the road to Hall Street.
News – good and bad, light and heavy – changes by the minute, but sometimes it’s helpful to pause and assess matters overall, and with an open mind. This is what we see: Amid all of the tumult and tragedy, there is a steady beat of kindness in the communities we cover. A life of generosity is a life well lived, and we’re grateful we get to hear the stories of such lives and share them with readers. This is a better planet because of them.
And that reminds us: We wish the current or future residents of Proxima b, the newly discovered Earth-like planet orbiting the red dwarf Proxima Centauri, all the best, but we have no plans to move in (even if existing technology allowed it). With each passing day, we become more convinced that there’s nothing broken here that can’t be fixed. That’s the good news.