Monterey Park, Evansville shootings, hero Brandon Tsay — we need the news, good and bad

We like good news but typically the news is not good. Too often no news is good news. In reality, no news is bad news for us all.

There is lots of recent bad news. A crazed gunman entered a dance hall in Monterey Park, Calif., killing 10 people and wounding many innocent people. A former employee walked into an Evansville, Ind., Walmart and shot an employee in the face in the store break room. The shooter was killed by local police. A planned protest in downtown Atlanta turned violent when protestors damaged stores and burned a police car over the weekend.

We did hear astonishing good news from Monterey Park. Brandon Tsay confronted the gunman at a second location where he was about to enter and kill more people. He heroically wrestled the gun away from the killer and pointed it at him causing the gunman to leave the scene. Only God knows how many lives Tsay saved. He is a true hero.

News is always happening nationally, locally and individually to us all. We need the information whether it’s good or bad. We need the national and regional news, but the local news is up front and close to us.

For example, all around us we are targets of scams, thieves and prowling bad people. Americans were scammed to the tune $5.8 billion in 2021 (Digital Guardian). We are never beyond being duped. Today, daily text messages, e-mails, phone calls and mail come to Americans phishing for a sucker who will buy the false story they are telling. They are good at what they do.

My son was away in a foreign country when I was duped out of $350 years ago. The caller was very professional sounding and convincing. I believed that if I did not pay the money owed by my son it would negatively impact his career. This was at the beginning of the telephone scam industry, and I paid him the money. Later, I realized that I had been scammed.

Years ago, a dear friend received a telephone call from someone posing as an Internal Revenue Service agent. The scammer told the senior adult man that he owed $45,000 in back taxes for various reasons. The friend was about 90 years old and living on a meager retirement income. He didn’t realize he was being scammed, was overwhelmed with anxiety and killed himself.

“At every level of life there is a new devil,” an old friend once said. At every stage of life, there are new twists, turns and curves. We are never beyond being informed, learning and developing. Young people make mistakes, but so do old people. We often think we’ve lived long enough and know most everything, but we don’t. Most of us have become more aware of this problem but crooks work at catching people off guard and are constantly developing new schemes.

Today, we have search engines and are inundated with news and information. However, we don’t hear all the news nor do we know everything we need to know when we need to know. Often, we learn the hard way. This is why education is expensive. Life experience education is often the most expensive and difficult of all learning processes. Even in life, education we learn but we don’t always utilize the life experience very much. Too often we repeat the same mistakes hoping for a different outcome.

We can’t go wrong with good information. This is why you need the publication you are reading. Your local paper and online news sources are crucial to a community’s health and overall well-being. Local newspapers, blogs and online sources tell what is happening in your local town and county. Support this news source with your subscription and advertising needs. County newspapers that have been around for years continue to close. Every week, I receive notification of a newspaper printing its final edition, and that’s not good news.