Good news amongst the bad
These days The News is certainly bad if not downright terrible and terrifying. To cheer our spirits, it might help to apply the adage “Follow the Money,” but do so in reverse.
For the clinically old, “follow the money” evokes visions of Dick Tracy, Sam Spade, or Sergeant Preston of the Royal Mounted Police and his faithful dog, King, sniffing the trail of clues of who-paid-what-to-who-when-and-why until they find the cowering Bad Guys clutching stolen cash in blood-soaked hands.
Applied in reverse, the phrase can lead us back to the Good News in Tragedy, to spot Rainbows lurking behind dark and stormy skies.
For, sadly, much of the Good News in our economy (and countless livelihoods) is rooted in the Bad News – that endless series of major and minor tragedies that enable society to generate fortune from misfortune and Do Good in the process. Ghoulish as it sounds, many jobs and thriving enterprises depend on Tragedy and the desire to prevent or heal it that is woven into the woof and warp (look it up) of our psyches.
When disasters strike — illnesses, injuries, mass-shootings, wildfires, bankruptcies, hurricanes, wars, car crashes, chlamydia — suffering people everywhere don’t care if those responding to help also profit from doing so. Misfortune is a daily occurrence in every community. Swathed in pain and grief, it is understandable that few appreciate — ghoulish as it may sound — the “good” that suffering creates, in Sonoma Valley and around the world.
Take a car accident, with smashed fenders and a battered body or two. Like Rumpelstiltskin, it spins the golden threads that weave the cloth of jobs and profit for:
- EMT’s, ambulance and fire engine drivers; nurses, doctors, pharmacists, hospital clerks, accountants, and other staff; employees of hospital construction firms, medical equipment manufacturers, and service & supply firms such as those that make computers, tongue-depressors, stethoscopes, mops, brooms, telephones, EKG, X-ray, CRT and MRI machinery, light bulbs, toilet paper, hospital beds, monitors, furniture, sheets, bedding, floor-polishing machinery, disinfectants, garbage collectors, pharmaceuticals, gift-shop merchandise, coffee makers; lawyers…
- Employees of ambulance and fire engine manufacturers and of the industries that supply those manufacturers, such as: steel mills and fabricators, tire manufacturers, rubber plantations, fire hose makers, valve & pump makers, fuel and oil companies, lubricant makers, windshield glass companies, CB radio and instrument makers, fire hydrant makers, public works departments who maintain the hydrants, water pipeline makers and installers, makers of backhoes that dig the trenches for waterlines; lawyers…
- Professors and others employed by universities and medical schools who train doctors, nurses, and technicians, and the suppliers and contractors who support those schools, e.g.: janitorial firms, landscapers, security firms, overhead projector manufacturers, coroners who supply corpses and body parts for students to study, the formerly living who donated body parts, CPAs, recruiters; lawyers…
- Workers at towing companies, auto repair shops, scrap yards, cemeteries, new car dealerships & manufacturers, grief counselors and therapists, probate court judges and staff, insurance brokers; lawyers…
Yes, the Prosperity of Tragedy is woven into the fabric of our economy, and of Life itself. Beginning with the Pilgrims’ voyage to the New World to escape persecution at home, it often seems that avoiding, alleviating, or distracting ourselves and our families from Suffering is what America is all about.
It would certainly explain pickleball. And lawyers.
