The other day I noticed that it’d been a while since I’d seen any good news.
I had to wonder:
- Was that because there isn’t any good news?
- Or was I just not searching hard enough for it?
I mean, I watch cute videos on Twitter and YouTube. They’re called “timeline cleansers,” and people share as they find them.
But that’s not the same as hunting for good news simply because I wanted to experience it.
I discovered that, oddly enough, the good stuff is easy to find if you look for it. I simply typed in the words, “good news,” in an internet browser, and a bunch of happy news items presented themselves.
The first site I visited was notallnewsisbad.com. To be fair, the initial entries, while good, were the result of a bad thing.
I followed a link to KRON4 in San Francisco to learn about a 10-year-old girl who’d been reunited with her cat. That’s not big news. Cats get reunited with their owners every day.
In this case, 10-year-old Agnessa was a refugee from the war in Ukraine, and the cat’s name is Arsenii. They’re together thanks to a Sonoma County, California, man named Geoffrey Peters, who decided that helping the family meant helping the cat as well.
That’s pretty good.
The headline on the next story of notallnewsisbad.com is positive, but it also comes with a connection to war: “Ukrainian teenager wins $100,000 for work on detecting landmines.” The link took me to the Evening Standard in London.
Igor Klymenko, 17, bested more than 7,000 other students to win the prize. He developed a drone that detects landmines.
I thought, What’s so happy about that?
Then I remembered some of the work done by Linda McCartney, Sir Paul McCartney’s late wife. She was dedicated to eradicating landmines that could sit unexploded for years, so anyone could lose a limb or a life long after the war was over.
The drone could create exponential goodness for people around the world. It’ll be the kind of good news that won’t be reported. Because thanks to Igor’s ingenuity, many bad things won’t happen.
After another browser search, I found beinspired.global, which told the story of a woman in Louisiana driving home with a new puppy.
The puppy got spooked and scurried under Pamela Dennis’ feet, so she couldn’t stop her vehicle. Pamela, her 4-year-old granddaughter, the puppy and the car ended up in deep water under an overpass.
Luckily for her, Pamela had an app on her phone called LIFE360. It detected the sudden motion of the car and sent an alert with the location to her family members.
Officers responded, broke out the glass in the car, and saved all three occupants.
If you have time for another dose of good news, I found some at thegoodnewshub.com.
Thanks to the people at Elephant Nature Park in Thailand, a young elephant named Me-Bai has been returned to her mother’s side.
Three years ago, she was taken and forced to be an unwilling participant in Thailand’s tourism trade. She was worked to exhaustion and couldn’t provide rides anymore. That sounds like bad news, except the episode got the attention of Elephant Nature Park.
If I’d wanted bad news, I could’ve found it without even trying, but isn’t it nice to know how easy it is to find goodness in the world if you take the time to look?
