“Geez-o-Pete. Enough already. Leave the guy alone.” Yes, yes. I know. But the price of silence is too high for my conscience to bear. Somebody has to say something. Into the fray once more …
In a major metropolitan newspaper that is purportedly operated by people who can read, Steve Blow wrote this column today. It begins:
It was a bad year for Twinkies and Lance Armstrong, for Rangers fans and American Airlines passengers.
But maybe we didn’t pay enough attention to all the good news that came along in 2012. So let’s end the year on a high note, taking stock of some things that went right.
Some big local accomplishments were hard to miss – the soaring Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, downtown’s lively Belo Garden and Klyde Warren deck park, the snazzy Perot Museum of Nature and Science and, of course, Melissa Rycroft’s win on Dancing With the Stars.
He goes on to offer a litany of reasons to be hopeful. The Belo Garden. Teen pregnancies are down. So is smoking among teens. Childhood obesity is down. And so on.
Okay, the sentiment actually isn’t a bad starting point for a column. “There’s been a lot of horrible news lately. [And I don’t know how you write this column without explicitly mentioning the Newtown murders and the rape and murder in India.] But have hope in humanity. In every tragedy, look for the helpers, the heroes.” Something like that. Do some meaningful research. But just offering a bunch of statistics you got from a Google search — Deaths from vehicle crashes fell to the lowest total since 1949! — doesn’t get the job done. That’s not good news. It’s just laziness.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong here. Maybe Steve Blow uses Bing instead of Google.
