What the media isn’t showing.
Skye Cooley writes with frustration over at the Huffington Post about the lack of national media coverage of the flooding in Louisiana. He’s right that the media tends to want to tell stories about the abnormal, and there’s a pretty significant reason why they don’t consider this story abnormal: the community is (as much as possible) actually functioning to solve its own problems.
No stories of looting, no stories of riots, no devolving of society to the lowest forms of humanity…instead a tragedy that has brought out the best in friends, family, and neighbors; people who help others before they help themselves…who see the assistance of others as an assistance of self.
Rather than reward that with aid and bringing the full force of our collective national attention to examples of what resilient and strong American communities look like when challenged…these communities are ignored and left to fend for themselves…simply because they can. The consequence of being a strong community is that your tragedy is not mentioned in national news, your strength uncelebrated, and your needs unmet unless they can be met through your own resilience. Humility and selflessly helping others does not fit the script of our news media… that is more of a tragedy than any flood.
Of course, technically a community working well is a bit abnormal these days, so in some sense this should be a story even by national media standards. So I made sure to share it for you here!
Brian Brown loves building the environments, habits, and networks that make people thrive. He is the founder of Humane Pursuits, where he writes a featured column and edits the Give channel. He started his consulting company, Narrator, to help great mission-driven organizations modernize and grow. He lives with his wife Christina and son Edmund in Colorado Springs, where they mix cocktails, hunt for historic architecture, and see how many people they can squeeze into their house for happy hour.