“What explains this alarming state of affairs? Lack of leadership and lack of means. No one is in charge of telling America’s still-inspiring story to the world.” — Joseph I. Lieberman and Gordon J. Humphrey in the Washington Post

In many arenas, America finds herself wanting.

She faces relatively high rates of crime, suicide, and obesity, and low rates of educational achievement. She’s fallen way behind China in the number of patents and trademarks filed.

Perhaps worst of all, America finds herself cleaved by deep political divisions that lacerate families, stagnate our elected leaders to the point we face government shutdowns every time we turn around, and fracture our collective understanding of truth.

Yet I still believe in America’s story.

Because I still believe in America’s people.

The front page of Wednesday’s edition of The News provides all the evidence I need.

There, in the centerpiece slot, we see an anonymous donor has stepped up to offer $35,000 to cancer aid organization Friends Together if the group can raise $35,000 from the community. I have no doubt that will happen, because it happened in 2022, when Northeast Michigan rallied to provide the group $50,000.

Above the fold, along the left rail, we see numerous community organizations rallying together to raise awareness of and combat child abuse.

Finally, on the bottom of the page, we see Northeast Michigan police agencies learning from the nonprofit Partners in Prevention how to better and more safely respond to individuals struggling with mental health crises.

In small-town and big-city papers all across this nation, we learn of people working to better their communities, lift up their neighbors, improve their own lives. From all walks of life, Americans sometimes put aside their political differences and sometimes disregard politics all together to strive to make their homes better tomorrow than they are today.

That’s not exclusively American, but it is richly part of America’s story because those efforts are not only protected but encouraged by the nation’s founding documents. In charity, advocacy, and learned compassion, I see the pursuit of happiness.

In some corners of this tiny globe of ours, the people can’t better their communities because they can’t peaceably assemble and/or have no money to give. In some nations, police don’t learn to protect the most vulnerable of their neighbors because in some nations police don’t even pretend to protect the people, they subjugate them, oppress them, harass and maim them.

America’s people have always been free to work collectively toward common goods because, for all her faults, America still grants her people freedom to define for themselves what good means and the right to fight for it.

And I still believe in America because it is her people — not her government — who control her ultimate destiny.

And I believe her people, despite the poor example set by those in power, still have her best interests and the best interests of their neighbors in heart.

In an opinion piece published this week in the Washington Post after Joe Lieberman’s recent death, the late former senator and Gordon Humphrey, another former senator, argued that the U.S. needs to pump up its propaganda machine. “Malefactor regimes” such as China and Russia are winning the “information war” with their own propaganda on social media sowing division and distrust among Americans, the two said, and America needs to get back in the propaganda game through the State Department and National Security Council.

I’ve never been a fan and will never be a fan of taxpayer dollars going toward propaganda, because I don’t trust the White House or the halls of Congress to always be led by people willing to tell the truth or even understand what America’s people are really like.

Rather, I think America ought to amplify the stories told daily in community newspapers and small-market TV stations around the nation, because that is the story of America, of her struggles and of those triumphing over those struggles. If the National Security Council wants to tell the world what Americans are capable of, its leaders could select a small-town newspaper story to post to social media every day.

The national press ought to do a better job telling those stories, too.

The primary job of the press, like a doctor, is to tell you what’s broken so you can know what needs fixing.

But, like a doctor ought to tell you the healthy behaviors and diets that can aid your ills, the press ought to also highlight examples of things that work so we can know how to get involved in productive ways.

The problem with the national press is they get stuck in the corridors of supposed power — New York and Washington, mostly — and spend too little time out in the fields and main streets and rural enclaves where the power to better this nation actually resides.

There, the former senator Humphrey and his lot would find the real story of America and find it’s still something to believe in.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-354-3112 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.