Have you watched the news lately? If not, I don’t recommend starting now. But just in case you’re curious, here’s what you’ve been missing: The newscast will start out talking about some dysfunctional part of our government or political process. Next, it will move into a disaster that happened somewhere hundreds if not thousands of miles away from here: a tornado, earthquake or tsunami (and that’s just in Oklahoma). And finally, you’ll hear about a random killing of some unarmed person. Add in a few Lipitor commercials and I just saved you 30 minutes of your life you’ll never get back.

When I read the national newspapers, which I kind of have to do for my job, I’m always struck by the negativity and crises happening all around the world. Then, I pickup the Tryon Daily Bulletin and you know what I see? I see kids getting scholarships. I see new classes being offered at the Tryon Arts and Crafts School or Isothermal Community College. I see information about the new play coming up at the Tryon Little Theatre.

Sure, I see the same old classified ads or insurance salesperson, but that’s the lifeblood of the paper, so that’s ok as well. Occasionally, I’ll read about a meth lab being busted or someone getting caught for possession, again all good stuff in my mind. If they’re doing that stuff, they should be caught. These are just reminders of how well our local law enforcement performs with such a tough job and limited resources.

I knew I had moved to a small town, when one of the first cover stories I read was titled, “Town Approves Purchase of Backhoe After All.” As if there had been some debate internally about whether or not it was a good idea. The news wasn’t that the town purchased a new tractor, which is certainly newsworthy in a small town; it was the fact that they were debating whether or not to purchase it.

I grew up in Anderson, S.C., which is also known around here as, “the crime capital of the world.” For the record, it’s not! Anderson used to have an entire section of the local paper dedicated to community stories, like the ones that fill the pages of the Tryon Daily Bulletin every day. Now, with most of their content going online, those feel-good stories have been taken away or replaced by the latest drug deal that went down. Those stories seem to help sell ads I guess. Not the ones about the little league baseball team.

We may joke about having, “The World’s Smallest Daily Newspaper,” but thank God we have our local daily (almost) paper to help distract us from all that’s supposedly going wrong in the world.

No death, disaster or dysfunction here. Just a bunch of kind, good-hearted people trying to serve each other the best way we know how – and the occasional tractor purchase.

~ Michael Baughman