News reporting is like customer service; sometimes good things happen, but no-one says anything. There’s good reasons why.
Even more likely; bad things are avoided or solved, and with the solution the impact and newsiness of the story fades away, either no longer interesting, a story that never developed, or a dog with a missing tail.
The dog’s tail disappears easily in the world of customer service. When I was a customer service manager for two years, I remember working very hard for a customer, who then was pleased and didn’t “quit” my company. Essentially I avoided a problem … but in an unquantifiable way. Maybe the customer wasn’t really going to quit, he was just bluffing; who will ever know?
The tail disappears like the end of the story; but it’s more like there is no story; nothing ever happened … unless the customer quits. Good customer service is like a tragedy-avoided and can not be counted; it can’t be entered into a database; the customer service job, in the sense of saving a disgruntled customer, may require expertise, grace, patience, virtue and desire, but the ultimate “save” could be described as speculative. After all the hard work, skill and getting it right, nothing changes on the books.
In the same way, the unfolding of any tragedy being interrupted could be seen as invisible energy doing good, with no logical path to the good work ever being acknowledged.
If a kid wants to shoot up a school, which idea he may have gotten from seeing it be done before, and a school being a no guns zone by law where undeputized citizens (in the U.S.) are not allowed to carry, and he forms a plan, during this time he’s vulnerable to being interrupted. He may even seek out people who may interrupt him, feeling undecided and unsupported.
How many of these scenarios – interrupted – where the kid changes his mind because of an intervention, are on the books? It must be hard to count. But that’s not because our security officers, police, teachers, guidance counselors and parents aren’t doing a good job, it’s despite that they may be. One bad apple spoils a lot of good work being done in our schools every day.
This isn’t a bad world we live in. If for every bad event that didn’t get interrupted by a guidance counselor we had a news feature telling us how a tragedy was probably avoided by good decision-making based on good public safety and mental health standards, we’d have an equal-news-coverage situation, but it would be tricky to do, and impossible to quantify the interruptions.
We shouldn’t hold our heads in shame because our race is headed for hell. That’s exactly the one thing we do know. It can’t be quantified, but what we believe, that people are of the same mind, against violence and law-breaking, can be what we teach our children. That there aren’t two camps on the topic of the safety of your child in school.
Sociology evolves over time, values get stronger and beliefs become new values, grown from the seed of what you teach your children today. That can be just as easily as fear … a positive message, and a lesson that thrusts them successfully forward into a world where they don’t always expect it, but can hope to achieve happiness.
You till fear … or hope.