After the election,
a few friends said,
“I’m off the news for a while.”
Some never went back.
Too much fear,
too little they could do.
“It’s like being yelled at with no way out,”
one of them said.
A researcher told us,
“If you keep feeding people threats
but no way to respond,
they shut down.
They stop listening.
It’s not apathy,
it’s survival.”
And then she showed us two stories.
A school where things fell apart—
graduation rates dropped,
students stopped showing up.
The kind of story
that gets covered.
And across the river,
a school where things got better—
more kids finishing,
more hope in the halls.
Same community.
Same economy.
Different choices.
She asked,
“Which story do you report?”
The room was quiet.
Then someone said,
“The first one.
That’s where the problem is.”
I remember thinking,
But isn’t the second one
where the answer lives?
That night,
I didn’t watch the news.
I took a walk instead.
Past the school,
past the river.
Just listening.
It wasn’t dramatic.
But I noticed a small light
in one classroom window.
Someone was working late.
It was enough
to remind me:
not everything is broken.
Not everyone has given up.
And sometimes,
that’s the story
that needs telling.
The Afterword 
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