In 1949, when I was seven years old, Kathy Fiscus fell down a well in San Marino, California. Stan Chambers was right there in my living room, on our brand-new TV, telling us about the tragedy, with pictures. The response of the community was swift, but Kathy didn't survive the fall and the lack of oxygen. She died at the age of three, small enough to fall through a hole in the world. You remember things like that when you not only hear about them but can see them as well. So the new technology brought tragedy closer to us, and we all shared some of the pain.
Today's technology brings so many reports of pain, struggle, suffering, death, loss, poverty and hopelessness that sometimes I just want to shred the newspaper, turn off the media pundits, and escape into a different world. But we are fascinated by the drama of others, fascinated by the pictures, and the stories. And I don't turn off those reports. I keep hoping that there will be news -- good news -- that we have found a way to feed our hungry children, stopped fighting and killing one another, turned the economy around, and that right-mindedness will prevail over ignorance and self-promotion.
I have noticed, lately, that in the middle of the Business section of my newspaper there are occasional stories that indicate all is not as hopeless or dire as the headlines would lead us to believe. A business turned a profit this last quarter, and is hiring again; a new study indicates that previous reports of lost revenue were not factual...things like that. A tiny chink of light can do a lot to dispel the gloom and doom.
There is, of course, a necessity to keep information coming. And there is a great need to make sure what we read is weighed and tested by each of us to make sure it is the most accurate we can get. That's hard work.
But what an opportunity to bring our communities together, too. With today's technology we come together to figure out meaning, to figure out where we can hope, to figure out what we can do to make a difference. Most of us are not in those wells, but we know someone who may be struggling with joblessness, hopelessness, poverty, illness -- whatever that hole in the world looks like. And our technology brings us together to comment, discuss, instant message, post, report, and take up collections of money and signatures. We can do something, together, about lifting someone else out of the pit; about pulling ourselves out of our own particular crack in the universe.
So that little girl who fell down a well, and the technology that told us her story, for a moment brought us all together to hope and then to mourn. The words on her tombstone read "One Little Girl Who United the World for a Moment." May today's technology do that for us now.
