Good News Weekly

For 25 years of my life I lived in a community (actually it was a City) 9 miles southwest of Annapolis, Maryland. When I first moved there in 1973 the population was about 5,000 (it is now over 20,000). The main community was build around a championship Golf Course and Country Club. Across the street from the Country Club was the Village Green. The Green had a Bank, a Barber Shop, a Doctor’s Office, a Deli, several offices, several small shops and a Restaurant, Bar and Liquor Store combination.

One of the Village Green offices housed the local Newspaper. It was a weekly that came out on Thursday and was delivered for free to all residents. The paper was mostly advertisements but there was a good amount of community news and listings of local area events in nearby towns and cities.

The greatest thing about this newspaper is that it was all good news. No stories about the gas crunch of 1973-74, no national or state news (unless it had a direct bearing on the community) and no political bullshit. The publisher knew that we could get all that news from the Washington Post, Baltimore Sun or Evening Capitol (Annapolis).

I’m sure that there are thousands of local newspapers throughout the United States that use this same format. Most of them print only the good news.

Yesterday I started thinking (which is a dangerous thing for me to do), why don’t we have a Weekly National Newspaper that prints only “good news”. They could call it the Good News Weekly.

I sure that there are many people, like me, that are tired of reading all the bad and depressing news that appears in our daily newspapers. If there is a “good news” story, it is sandwiched between Ads and tucked away on page 18 before you get to the OP/ED section. Worse than that, it appears on the Obit Page (here’s the good news before you read the bad news).

And as Forrest Gump would say; “That’s all I have to say about that”.

The Beach Bum