Harsh images distort our outlook on life

The Boston Herald

Beverly Beckham

They stood at the bottom of an escalator at T.F. Green Airport in Providence Thursday afternoon, three little boys and their grandparents, the oldest boy no more than 4. He was holding a sign that spelled out with different-colored crayons, ``WELCOME HOME, MOM AND DAD.'' The sign was bigger than he was.

I wasn't the only one riding the escalator who smiled and then swallowed hard seeing this. A lady who'd been on my flight wiped tears from her face. Even the hardest faces softened. I didn't hear the grandmother say, ``Look. There they are!'' But I watched her point and saw the boys - all three of them - find their parents in the crowd and light up the way only children can, everything that matters to them on that escalator coming back home to them. The sign holder shouted, ``Daddy!'' The next in line tugged at his grandmother's hand. The youngest, in his grandfather's arms, wriggled to be let down.

I want this scene replayed on TV and on the Internet in a must-see video: ``Live, from Providence.'' I want someone with a microphone and a camera to stand in the middle of everyday life - in the middle of a park, in the middle of a symphony - and report the good along with the bad because the bad isn't the whole picture, only part of it.

But more and more every day, all day, we are made to believe that the bad is the entire thing.

Kait and Emily played tennis for Canton High School Thursday afternoon and it was a good match, and afterward, they went with their friends to Crescent Ridge for ice cream. Al cut the grass while his dog, Dante, lay in the driveway. My father worked in his yard. Doctors doctored. Teachers taught. Not everything is a tragedy.

The lilacs are in bloom right now. The air is sweet with them. They'll be gone in a few days - their smell, their color - and it will be a full year before we'll see them again. But there is no one reporting this, no one saying stop and smell them now. There are 1,000 different kinds of lilacs, and they're not all purple and white, they're pink, too. Isn't this amazing? Isn't every spring?

We don't notice all that is good because we're told about all that is bad. Slugs and allergies, and don't get too much sun. And watch out for mosquitoes and ticks and coyotes and undercooked beef. Even the trivial is tragic. It may be sunny today, folks, but don't get too comfortable. The bad weather will be back with us tomorrow.

Fear is a constant. I know this world is not the Garden of Eden. But it's not quite Hell, either - not all the time. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake but millions of other French girls grew up and lived lives no one knows about.

In the margins and in the white spaces between the words, on the empty pages of history, away from cameras, out of the public eye - that's where most of us exist. The pictures in our heads, grotesque pictures, pictures that are worse than horror movies, aren't all of life. They're pieces, cruel and primitive, no different from the rack, no different from the stake, no different from what Charles Manson and his crowd did to Sharon Tate 35 summers ago.

Meanness is a perennial, too. We have 1,000 different kinds of lilacs and 1,000 different ways of hurting one another.

But meanness is not the whole story. Our ideas about the world and about the people in it are influenced not only by what we are shown, but also by what we see firsthand. We are shown monsters and depravity and cunning and cruelty.

But what we see up close are lilacs in bloom and three little boys, not all little boys, just three. But they bring hope to the world.