THROUGH A LENS DIMLY

WHAT IF

by Dick Kraus
Newsday Staff Photographer (Retired)

(Thoughts gleaned from the pages of our newspapers...).

What if there were no perps to be walked this morning because none were arrested the night before?

What if that minority single mother living in the projects with her two young kids caught them playing with matches before they started that fatal fire?

What if that madman just put a single bullet into his demented brain instead of slaughtering 33 innocent Virginia Tech students?

What if a local politician called a press conference and the press didn't attend because it wasn't newsworthy?

What if that rock star called his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor and went to a meeting instead of snorting that last overdose of coke?

What if that fundamentalist Middle Eastern radical decided that today wasn't the day to be bombing a school bus filled with children of another ethnicity?

What if the opposing factions in Iraq went to their respective mosques to pray for peace instead of detonating themselves in their midst?

What if the guy who was just flipped the bird because he honked his horn at another driver on the Freeway, just shook his head and kept driving instead of chasing the offender down and pumping his car with automatic weapons fire, severing the spinal cord of the innocent 12 year old passenger in the back seat, rendering her a cripple for the rest of her life?

What if there was no drought anywhere in the world; no tornadoes; no earthquakes, mud slides, forest fires?

What if there was nothing newsworthy to put on Page One of your newspaper tomorrow.

What if your News Editor had to move that photo that you took of Jackie Jones and her 4-H Club award winning 12 pound tomato to Page One because there was simply nothing else with which to lead the paper?

Now, what would they run on the cover of the Feature Section/Home Section/Regional Section/Second Front?

Think about that.

Dick Kraus

http://www.newsday.com
newspix@optonline.net