Oftentimes, newscasts will start off with bad/concerning news. There’s been a murder in the community. A fire has destroyed a family’s home. A tractor-trailer accident sent multiple motorists to the hospital. An elected official has been arrested on corruption charges.
The same holds true for newspapers, of course, depending on what the news cycle was like for the day prior.
Some people refer to this as the “if it bleeds, it leads” philosophy. While there’s some truth to that, something audiences should keep in mind is that news organizations are in the information business, to inform the community of the most important goings-on locally or nationally, depending on the media outlet.
Naturally, stories about violent crime and people getting hurt or killed are, more often than not, going to be the first they share with their audience.
Understandably, this can have the net effect of turning some people off from the news because, let’s face it, there’s a lot of bad news out there.
But there’s also a lot of good news, something we recently saw play out in Tennessee, where one woman taking notice of a man in need in her city completely changed his life for the better.
Earlier this month, Manchester, Tennessee, resident Brittany Smith placed a Starbucks order on her DoorDash app. Having a doorbell camera, she noticed the person who delivered it was elderly, walked slowly and had trouble getting up her front porch steps to make the delivery.
Eventually, the delivery person put it by her door and left. But Smith was curious and set about finding out who he was and put the video — which has since gone viral — on the internet. She discovered that his name was Richard Pulley and that he was a 78-year-old retiree who needed to work to help pay bills and for his wife’s medications.
According to reports, he and his wife, Brenda, were “tag-teaming” deliveries after she’d lost her job, with her behind the wheel and him taking the DoorDash orders to customers’ doors.
Smith immediately set up a GoFundMe fundraiser after learning their story and wrote in the first entry that “by the time they pay their monthly expenses plus purchase their medication, there is nothing left.”
“Let’s help Richard go back into retirement!!” she added.
In three days, $500,000 was raised. A week after that, the amount raised closed in on a million dollars. DoorDash donated $20,000.
This past Saturday, Smith met up with the Pulleys and handed them a check for $965,000. In her GoFundMe update, which included a picture of Richard Pulley holding the check, Smith wrote, “Richard was gifted the check for your generous donations! You all made it possible for him to retire and live comfortably for the remainder of his life! Humanity is not a thing of the past!”
The Pulleys were grateful, but Richard Pulley said the work made him realize it felt good to be active again after being retired for several years.
“They’ve set my wife and I up so that we can live a more comfortable life,” Pulley said of all the people who donated, according to NBC News. “But after a week or two of this, and it cools down, we’ll get back to work because I feel good being useful.”
May God continue to bless the Pulleys, Brittany Smith and all who donated to help him be able to work at his leisure, and for the Pulleys to be able to live comfortably and pay their bills and medications.
This is just more proof that there are extraordinarily good people among us everywhere and that we don’t have to look far to find them … nor the good news stories.
North Carolina native Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym Sister Toldjah and is a media analyst and regular contributor to RedState and Legal Insurrection.
