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Prologue – As a consequence of the incessant barrage of bad news (war, conflicts, terrorism and empty political promises.), THE WORDWRIGHT is going to attempt to write about the GOOD news. At least for a while, if not regularly, occasionally for sure – only GOOD news will be our priority.
The rookie news reporter is told, “You don’t report on a house that is not burning down.” Seems simple enough but do you only have to report just the bad news? As I began working on essays about GOOD news, the phrase “There’s Good News Tonight” came to mind and as some writers do, I headed for the Internet and sought out that phrase on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The man behind this phrase was Gabriel Heatter. Gabriel Heatter did one better than that rookie news reporter in the first line of this paragraph – when he needed a lot of comfort himself, as he admitted later, he picked himself up and seemed able to pick others up as well! (Gabriel Heatter was a top news broadcaster back in the 1930’s and 1940’s whose audience expanded when station WOR became the flagship station of the Mutual Broadcasting System.)
As often is the case in life, yet another phrase, “Laugh clown laugh” comes to mind and who knows how many clowns paraded around looking silly to make people laugh were perhaps at the bottom of their own self-image struggle – but they had to make others laugh. We can be grateful that people like Gabriel Heatter were around to give those who sat in their living rooms listening to the news during World War II, during a particularly discouraging time, American forces had sunk a Japanese destroyed and this bit of “good news” prodded Heatter to open his evening commentary, “Good evening, everyone – there is good news tonight.”
Gabriel Heatter was also well known for his uplifting good news for every alcoholic in 1939 when he gave the first national broadcast exposure in April of that year to a burgeoning self-help group, Alcoholics Anonymous. There were crepe paper hangers in those days too, as the critic wrote, “Disaster has no cheerier greeting than gleeful, gloating Gabriel Heatter.” His positive delivery was so contagious that when World War II finally ended, first in Europe and later in Japan,”…there were probably millions who would not have believed it until they heard it from Heatter.” (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, gets credit for many of these details.)
THERE IS ALWAYS GOOD NEWS…
But it takes a better man or woman to find it and tell about it. I personally found this true when I was asked to be a judge in a local science fair last year. Judges, for some reason, are hard to find. The organization behind science fair activities believe that not only do they need specific individuals who hold qualifications appropriate to judge specific projects, they want people who can offer encouragement to eager students as well – those were my main qualifications as I do not hold a degree in any scholastic science subjects. One particular fact I discovered when working with those other judges – they were quality people and through their expertise they were there to see the good in those young minds and between the two obvious levels of qualifications (mine and the professional) we judges might have been just the thing to keep those students digging and striving to become better scholars. It was a time for GOOD NEWS, not bitter reminders of a flailing society, they can see that everyday on the TV news (?) programs.
I was awarded the “GOOD EGG AWARD”
I belong to the American Amateur Press Association and in recognition of my efforts in publishing an electronic newsletter for the membership, a lady who lives on Long Island, New York, thought I was a candidate to receive the “GOOD EGG AWARD”. If you don’t know what that is, a brief explanation is in order. Long Island is noted for having beaches with stones of unique descriptions, some flat and round stones, and to the creative mind, look a lot like a fried egg. So, now I have a cherished plaque-like flat stone, with another stone cemented on the top of the flat stone resembling a yellow-yoke topped fried egg. June Bassemir made my day when she mailed me my “Good Egg Award”. Perhaps you need to look around and see someone who needs “noticed” and give them some GOOD NEWS in the times when nothing but bad news seems to be present. June has awarded some twenty-five GOOD EGG awards – she notices good news and does something about it!
Take a look around you and LOOK FOR SOME GOOD NEWS. Perhaps some group or individual needs noticed and praised for their good work. Forget the TV tonight, and take a fast, as it were, from the gloom and doom fed to us and if you listen close, perhaps you can still hear Gabriel Heatter, say, “Ah, there’s good news tonight!”
THE WORDWRIGHT
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No, you don’t have to put your armor on and start defending your faith as compared or contrasted to mine. Just relax and consider a few thoughts dancing or prancing around in my head.
Isn’t it amazing how man has reacted to religion throughout time? The number or amount of “gods” is probably beyond counting so I won’t try. If we are to believe the first inkling of a person wondering about God or gods, the “fire” god or the sun god probably head the list. Then there must have been the scary experience of lightning and thunder; and the beginning of the “tater wagon” being upset (that’s thunder in case this is a “local” colloquialism in Ohio).
The Jewish segment of the religious worlds had its beginning with God appearing to Abraham in a dream telling him to “take off to a land that I will show you” and he left his kindred probably wondering what kind of signs he would receive next to “go there” or “stop here”? Or was it more certain than inklings? We’ll have to “fast forward” quite a bit to get to the scene of the “boiling mountain” where God etched words into two stones. Did you ever wonder why there were two stones? The most probable answer would be one could not hold the Decalogue but that is just a guess. I would be more inclined, with my inquiring mind, to know just how big those stones were! But, with that experience, you could say, man was given “some definite instructions” about religion or God. Before, it had been merely in dreams.
I am firmly of the opinion that even after the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob wrote on the tablets of stone, He was more interested in what those children of Israel did in their everyday life than what they did when they “went to church” or came around their family worship centers on the Sabbath or gathered specifically at the mobile assembly (the Tabernacle). If we can believe the incidental lessons shown in the great film, “Fiddler on the Roof”, it appears the Jewish Family had their own worship service in their home and tradition was the key. In fact, you may or may not know “Tradition” was one of the theme songs in that film story. A preacher I once knew said there were more gospel sermons in that film story than are preached in most pulpits across the nation in any given Sunday. You’ll have to study that I am sure to make any sense out of it.
A preacher in the times of the Nazi regime in Germany expressed “religion” with these words:
“Only he who believes is obedient; only he who is obedient believes.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said this, and he still believed it as German soldiers machined-gunned him to death.
Now I can ask my question again, “Do you ‘GO’ to church?” What I believe is that we are not to “GO” to church but rather, we “ARE” the church – in fact, those who attend church are probably the only “church” that many unbelievers see. They watch how we work around our houses, they might sit at a desk next to us at our job, they might hear how we talk at the filling station as we pump $3.45 a gallon gasoline into our tanks. They might hear some non-religious words when we mistake the nail on our fingertips for the nail in the wood. They might see the kind of movies we attend or the kind of books we buy at a newsstand. They might hear us dicker the price of an item at a yard sale and wonder about that. Although I think there are subtle examples in the Bible where we can learn that dickering prices or maybe even “challenging God” to change his mind about circumstances in our lives is not an ungodly practice.
A circumstance sticks out in my mind about actions speaking louder than prayers to God. Remember when Abraham made a deal with his wife when they were in the presence of Egyptians? He told these foreigners that Sarah was his sister. Then, through simple observation the Egyptians saw Abraham was lying. They even accused Abraham of (nearly) causing them to sin because of this lie! I have no doubt that God shook his head in disbelief as the ”The Father of the Jews” made a complete fool of himself. By the way, this was not a single incident in his life nor was he the only one who tried to pull this off.
Now we’re getting warmer to the gist of this essay -- “Pull this off”. Is the purpose behind religion or “going to church” some kind of game that we play, trying to prove to God, or our neighbors, how good we are? If that is the case, then we might as well forget it. The Scriptures are replete with examples, comparisons and principles that God is more interested in our hearts than our money or sacrifices. We could not find a bill of currency large enough to put in the plate to cover our guilt of sin. God knew this already, but for reasons that I still have difficulty in seeing, God allowed centuries to pass before the coming of Christ who, in essence, stomped his foot on the ground, exclaiming, “This is what God wants – your hearts!”
When the great lover of God, David the King, sinned the sin that sparked the beginning of the fall of the Kingdom of David, he pleaded with God to re-make him, to put him once again into his mother’s womb and allow him to be re-born! “Make me new, God!” (Read Psalm 51 again. Scholars say this rebirth is the essence of the original language in this passage.) God washed David’s soul and in the words of Isaiah the prophet, his sins were made “white as snow”. Changing the color of his sin was only figurative though—the penalties or consequences of those grave sins were not to be erased or ablated, reduced or made to disappear as courts do today to destroy the very evidence that a person once existed! We see the perfect example if a man falls out of a tree and breaks his arm—once he began that fall, the consequence was his arm would break—pure and simple. Truly God forgave David for his lust, lying, using people and even murder, but David had to “pay something” in a real personal way because he sinned. And in David’s prayer he hit the nail on the head – even though he cheapened the life of another man’s wife and even though he planned a strategy to get a man killed, he knew in his heart that he was sinning against God. Today’s society likes to pretend that sin does not exist. Wishing things away is comparable to expecting a bucket to hold water when the bottom is full of holes.
Forget the church building. Forget the solemn prayers offered at church. But notice the heart behind the mouth of those prayers. Is it a re-born heart, a re-born person? Is it a life different from the ungodly world around us? Merely “going to church” – whatever the church, is not what God wants. He wants us to be “good for something”, godly and righteous, so when others see us, they will know we’re different, and they don’t even have to know what church we attend!
THE WORDWRIGHT
Today’s essay was written by a friend of The Wordwright, JC Lamanna, of Syracuse, New York, who questions the din of modern reporters.
Where Have All the Reporters Gone?
I am sick unto death of coverage of the presidential nominating process. It's as though there is no other news in the world. And it points up the scarcity of competent news people who recognize there are more significant developments in our world and lives than this single, often nonsensical process.
I spent many years in news and public relations. One major lesson I learned is this: When reporters and editors want to find an easy way to fill space and time, they take what is easily available. Like news releases and speeches coined specifically to attract the lazy folks who are responsible for coverage.
What is lacking is the ability or the will to DIG for news. To seek out what is new, what is significant behind the handouts, what constitutes a broader spectrum of events that matter in the entire world. But, good grief, this would entail legwork, some intelligent understanding, a talent to ferret out what is important and meaningful to the lives of readers, viewers and listeners.
Apparently, news people capable of this kind of meaningful reporting are in exceedingly short supply.
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THANK YOU, JC Lamanna, Jr.
THE WORDWRIGHT
When I was a kid in high school, and for a few years later the Reader’s Digest ran regular columns on WORDS and NAMES, and thankfully there are still resources like that around, and they’re just a click away on the internet—you just have to be savvy on how to find them.
NAMES, so far as people are concerned used to mean something, or perhaps more clearly defining what the individual did -- silversmith, baker, turner or a miller (craftsmen in silver or made bread or was a wood-turner or owned a flour mill, just to suggest a few trades). Perhaps wrongly assumed as a generalization, the Jewish person usually could be tagged because of his name. Levin, or Levinson, or Levi? Goldsmith? And it could well be that later generations never gave it a thought as to why they had a name like Goldsmith. Naturally the people who bought or traded from these “root surnames” had their own roots but somehow their origins are obfuscated by the more predominant names.
Long, Short, Black, Brown, White, Lavender, Baker and Barber are a few more “American” names that might well be names brought over from “the old country” as they used to say. It has also been suggested, when the immigrants filtered through Ellis Island in that boiling pot of nationalities, that if the interviewer had trouble understanding a Polish, Czech or Slovak name the person behind him might have been so bound to become an American that when asked his name, could have said, “Same as his” pointing to the person in front of him just so he could get beyond the huge lines of people. Some names, also, became anglicized for practical or personal reasons because the English (American?) pronunciation was just not, shall we say, proper?
My wife’s maiden name was STEEL. For whatever reason, when any of her relatives in the previous years who “left home” and worked in the big city took the liberty of adding an “E” to their name – the plain STEEL name may have looked a little too plain and they thought the “E” might had some class to their name. The story that circulated in our town about the name STILL is interesting. There was a schoolteacher in our high school with that name, and he had a brother who was “in radio” in Columbus and he went by the name Bert Stille – pronounced Stillay. Does have a bit different ring (of importance) doesn’t it? The popular brand of chain saws is close, STIHL, but when pronounced with an accent it can almost sound like there is an E in there someplace. People in show business were often encouraged to take on a different name and some were just “stage names” while others were literally changed to a legal name for whatever reason
So far we have been assigning importance to surnames but that “first” name might have just as interesting derivation. One thing for sure, “first” names are not that old with the human race. The joke that usually elicits a laugh is of the brother-in-law who named his sister’s twin babies. The father of the babies had been away at the crucial time of picking a name, so the story goes, and was told when he came back, “Your wife’s brother named the twins!” “Oh no!” he thought and anxiously he asked what he named them. “Well, he named the girl Deniece." “Wow,” he thought, that’s not bad, and then, as customarily waiting for the other shoe to drop, the informant said, “And he named the boy, Denephew.” My wife has a two-name arrangement, Norma Jean, and it is sometimes possible to come close to guessing what year a person was born by their names! “Norma Jean” was one of the popular “girl” names in the years around 1932. Another idea was to name a child after a Hollywood star, like Brigitte, Rory or Troy, or one of the hundreds of other stars popular when the babies were born. Boys with my name, William, John or Joe and girls with Mary, Elizabeth and Ruth learn to be satisfied with a name that has been around for centuries—maybe thousands of years!
There was even the possibility during the middle ages that they didn’t go to the trouble of naming a child because of the plagues and diseases and the child might not live that long so why bother naming them. If that sounds cruel, I suppose you had to live in that time to appreciate it. Some names in other circles of civilization, especially American, liked their names so well (or could it be they were not too good a thinking of a new name) they simply added “Junior” or used Roman numerals to indicate the child was the second person by that name, or the third or fourth. Parts of America even became trickier, and named a boy, John Boy – you can’t help but wonder if they were not sure if it was a boy or girl, nah, no one is that confused. “John-Girl”, no that couldn’t be! A family I grew up with had seven (yes, seven) boys. Walter, Kline, Erston, Shirley, Ray, James and Frank. Whoops? SHIRLEY? Yes, and don’t you imagine he learned how to fight real good in school with a name like that? He still goes by that name and I imagine he is rather proud of that name now. He had a great Mom & Dad and just keeping such a first name ought to be proof of his respect for his parents!
Where are we going with all this? Anywhere you want to, I suppose and who knows, maybe there might be some other twists to this subject and more names might come up later. But one thing for sure, I would guess that whatever name a person had, you can be sure that any parent wants, more than anything else, that their child honors their name. Parents might be disappointed and even embarrassed if their son or daughter, or grandchildren ever do anything to dishonor and disgrace the family name.
What story is in your name?
THE WORDWRIGHT
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