Small Good News: Heroes Outnumber Villains By A Big Margin, And CNN Has Their Stories

Anyone who's awake can rattle off the bad guys, by name, by category, by the extreme price they've had to pay - the auctioning off of an extra house, a yacht, or, perish the thought, a treasured art collection - for what they've done. But here's a bracing concept, brought to you courtesy of CNN: There are at least 15,000 heroes out there, and those are just the ones who've been nominated during the course of the Atlanta-based news network's three-year-old CNN Heroes program.

The Beatles had it right: It's getting better all the time.

Susan Bunda, the disarmingly modest CNN executive who oversees the Heroes program, takes no credit for strategic thinking; nobody at CNN said hey, the country's in a rut - the globe's in a rut - so what can we do to cheer folks up? In fact, CNN Heroes program pre-dates the economy's free-fall, and started out as nothing more than making lemonade from lots of lemons. The network "is all over the place," says Bunda, always coming across great stories of individual effort, "and we knew these things were happening and felt we ought to be doing them."

She figured viewers would like the stories. No one expected that viewers would love the stories at a rate of over 3,000 nominees annually. If you want to see random acts of kindness at their absolute best, visit the site and read about Liz McCartney, 2008 Hero of the Year, and her post-Katrina efforts in New Orleans, or the young woman who started a running club for the homeless in Philly, or the woman who gets scavenging Cambodian children out of the trash dumps and into school.

"Dare to be inspired," says Bunda. "That's what it's really about. You can't watch these people without wanting to do something."

There are prizes each fall for the top ten heroes and the hero of the year, $25,000 up to $100,000 for the winners of an online vote, and this coming Thanksgiving the awards show will return to Los Angeles' Kodak theatre for another red-carpet event, but Bunda travels to celebrity city knowing who the real stars are.

"When we were rehearsing last year," she says, "it's so exciting, the lights are going up, the stage is being built, you see Christina Aguilera rehearsing - but when the heroes walked in for their rehearsal, everybody stopped what they were doing and applauded. When I think of the event, that's the visual I see."

She's not the only one. Being a CNN hero has changed the lives of many of the honorees, as well as of the people they've reached out to help. School bus driver Jorge Munoz has fed unemployed men since 2004, setting up a mobile kitchen seven days a week under an elevated track in Queens, drawing from his own paycheck and from donations. As the nightly crowd grew and grew, his resources began to shrink with the dwindling economy. The CNN Heroes feature was as good as a bank deposit: The New York Knicks invited him to a game, says Bunda with a satisfied laugh, "and at the break they gave him one of those enormous checks."

"Every one of these people breaks through to a bigger thing," she says. "It feels like a privilege to us to run the stories."

For the rest of us, it's a user's guide to effectiveness. Big bad news can knock us to the ground, disorient us, make us wonder if we can get up again, let alone be helpful to anyone else. Big bad news can seem like Goliath, which makes watching CNN Heroes the equivalent of a pretty nifty slingshot. Arm yourself with information and find a way to fight back.

Visit me at www.karenstabiner.com or write to me at [e-mail].

Comments

[davmyr]

I DON'T BELIEVE THAT FOR A SECOND. Heros are made a bigger deal of, to last longer in our memories, that is all, and villains must perform multiple acts of villainy, or a single monstrous act to be notable while heros can get away with one good feat, like that airline pilot that landed in the water. Humanity is not the noble beast, just the beast.

[Conk]

Yeah, but the few bad guys have jobs like, oh, I don't know, passing laws that harm 98% of us, while doling out favors to the other 2%.

[cinemaven]

I have a bad habit of forgetting I brought a purse with me when I go out. I've left it in bathrooms, at lunch counters, in my shopping cart, at people's homes and on a park bench. It totals about 20 times in my life that I've wandered off purseless and 20 times that some wonderful stranger has found it and either called or turned it in to security. On one occasion, a woman who had found my purse and called asked me to check to see that everything was in my wallet... I opened it, and to my surprise, there was a $20 bill inside. Since I don't carry money in my wallet, I mentioned that I wasn't sure where the money had come from and she laughed and said she hadn't wanted me to be disappointed that my money was stolen so she popped it in there. People are kind and good and wonderful for the most part and I've always believed that heroes outnumber villains by a gigantic margin.

[OtayPanky]

While there may be more good guys than bad guys overall (I would hope so anyway), the fact is that the REALLY bad guys control a disproportionate amount of money and power. More than anything else, this is the reason why the world remains such a sucky place for so many people.

As for the Beatles "It's getting better all the time", let's see:

1. John Lennon - Gunned down in front of his apartment

2. George Harrison - Stabbed in his home, then later died of cancer.

3. Paul McCartney - Lost his beloved Linda to cancer, and then got snookered by a maniac gold digger.

4. Ringo Starr - By his own admission spent most of his adulthood in an alcoholic fog.

In terms of wars, the 20th century was by far the bloodiest in history. The potential outcome of global warming in THIS century is so dire that all the major insurance companies - and the government - have redone their actuarial projections in anticipation of the coming 20 foot rise in our sea level.

So no, it's clearly not getting better all the time. To say it is is a sort of naivete we cannot afford. While there is certainly reason to be hopeful, that hope needs to be reality based, and not some new-age woo woo. It's going to talke a massive systemic shift for us to navigate the rough waters ahead. I'm hoping we'll read more blogs about THAT.

[PhillyQuaker]

On a happier note, Paul has a new girlfriend that he appears to adore.
Ringo is recovering. And he has repeatedly stated: "No regrets."
Pete Best (Band) now has a devoted following.

[OtayPanky]

Like I said, we do have reason to be hopeful, and we SHOULD be hopeful.

But there's a huge difference between the naive hope of a child ("It's getting better all the time") and the hope of an adult who lives with the sobering knowledge of how fragile our lives, and our world, really are.

[progressivelady]

someone needs to send this to chiney