Back in the day, when I worked for the Johnstown newspaper, an editor controlling the operation took it upon himself to cheer up the populace by ordering layout people to insert “Good News” graphics into some stories.
One such effort by a guy putting together the sports section met with a strong rebuke the next day from said editor. The Good News graphic had been inserted, as I recall, into a story about a track meet. Noted the editor, sure, the winning side thought it was good news, but what about the losers?
Life is all about perspective, a truth brought home by a recent story that appeared in San Francisco’s Chronicle newspaper and that was picked up by the zerohedge.com web site.
It told the story of a teenage Ukrainian girl brought to supposed safety in San Francisco who, after a short time experiencing life in public schools there, longed to return to her old school in war-torn Ukraine.
This girl was horrified to witness San Francisco students interrupting classes, jumping on desks, cursing at teachers. The girl was astonished when there was no punishment for these students; it was just standard operating procedure.
The girl also was harassed, had her cell phone stolen, and generally she was bullied, with little done by the administration to address the problem.
Returning to Ukraine for her was an attractive option to the living hell that is the reality of too many public schools in the good old U.S.A. How about that, all you ivory tower education liberals!
In a similar tale, a story was told of a Ukrainian woman “rescued” to a fresh start in a lesser neighborhood in Birmingham, England. The woman’s unhappiness with her new locale was attributed to her inability to cope with the diversity there.
But this woman’s visit to the local police web site, rife with statistics on various crimes, showed the problem was not her. She was just observing – correctly – the outlaws in control of an inner city, not all that different than being in a Ukrainian war zone.
It is beyond doubt statistically that major U.S. cities, almost all of them deep blue as in Democrat-controlled, have a quality of life that worsens with each passing day when you consider crime, ineffective schools, poor public services, high taxes and mammoth cost of living.
Yet we are to ignore the evidence. We need to adopt a perspective that accentuates the positive.
Yes, the cities are in collapse, but don’t those night television shots from blimps covering sporting events make it look all placid and lovely?
It all seems better from 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 feet. This ignores the reality that on the ground, it’s all different.
I recall infantry types who had fought in Vietnam offering the opinion that the people who spent the war on ships or flying jets over the rice paddies got a sanitized view of it all. It was different up close and personal.
Fast-forward to 2023 and a report tells us a teenage Ukrainian girl, confronted with the cesspool of a San Francisco public school, longs to return to her homeland, never mind the war.
We would do well to consider what we should learn about the world from this girl’s perspective.
Sam Ross Jr's site 