Wouldn't It Be Great If There Were Breaking Good News For Once

Bodies in the streets of Nice, France after
the latest in an unending series of terrorist attacks.  

Last night was the same old sad routine.

And to call the deaths of 84 people routine made the evening particularly sad.

As you well know by now, some scumbag drove a truck into a crowd in Nice, France who were out enjoying Bastille Day. 

Cue what happens with such hideous regularity now:

Networks broke in and gave updates. It was all Nice truck attack all the time on outlets like CNN and MSNBC.  It was the sad top topic on social media. Governments vowed vengeance, and we learned the stories of people who died while just living their lives and trying to enjoy the moment.

Mayhem and murder keeps happening  again and again and it's going to happen again and again. It's hard to stay positive in this kind of environment, isn't it?

I know this is fantasy, but wouldn't it be great if, just for once, some sort of shocking but wonderful breaking news came out of the blue?

Television stations would break into the mid-day game shows to breathlessly announce the news.

Wolf Blitzer and his CNN Situation Room would give us all the up to date news and rumors about how this Great Development just keeps getting better and better.

Rather than having somber and argumentive pundits give their take on what the latest tragedy means, they'd be forecasting the happy effects of this Great Breaking News.

People would be out on the streets celebrating. All you'd see on Facebook and Twitter is ecstatic reaction to the Great Breaking News. Wouldn't this be a great Top Trending Topic.

A smiling President Obama would hold an impromptu news conference, in which he announces this is the best day of his presidency and the United States would do everything in its power to ensure this Great Breaking News just keeps going and going.

Fantasy isn't reality, though.

The even sadder thing is I can't even imagine what my theoretical Great Breaking News would actually entail.

Depressingly, it's easy for me and everyone else to imagine the next terrorist attack. The guns, the bombs, the deaths, the bitter aftermath.

But what would the Great Breaking News look like? I can't even think of too many examples in history. Maybe the end of World War II? The moon landing?

The optimistic side of me wants to think that the reason the bad news dominates the airwaves is because things are basically good, and the bad is the exception. News is defined as something out of the ordinary happening. So a terrorist attack is out of the ordinary and an exception to the goodness maybe?

We also take comfort in the people who rush in to help the victims.

All that is well and good, but it doesn't feel like enough. What else can you do, though?

The darker side of me wants a little bit of torture against people like the idiot who drove the truck into the crowd in Nice, killing all those people.  I know torture is wrong and shouldn't be done.  I'm not talking about physical torture, though.

Most of the time, the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks are killed to stop them from doing further damage.

My idea of torturing the perpetrators is try to take them alive.  Meanwhile, videotape statements from victims and relatives of victims about the impact the attack had on them.  Get as many victims as you can who want to talk.

Then you put the perp in a cell forever. In that cell, 24/7 for years on end until the perp dies, you project the video of the victims' statements on all four walls of the cell, and play their words full volume. And just never stop

If it drives the terrorist in the cell insane, oh well. Let 'em suffer. The dark side of me says they deserve such awful mental pain.

Meanwhile, I keep longing for the Great Breaking Good News. Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were some anti-terrorist cell that keeps launching "attacks" of wonderful goodness and kindness on an an unsuspecting population