Extra! NYT Error Cause for Hope

To review so far:
I've tried smiling when I didn't feel like it. (Didn't work.)
I've forced laughter in a large group (Did somewhat work.)
I've experimented with the occult (Are you kidding me?)
And I've read a Deepak Chopra book (Willing to grudgingly admit some of it made sense.)

To sum up, I've been a dabbler, an optimism dilettante who takes the lighter side of the positive attitude industry, exploits it for a few chuckles and moves on. Chicken soup, anyone?
But I have to say that approach is lacking. The leap from pessimist to optimist is a profound one, and it's not going to happen without some equally profound change on my part.
So today I'm going to deal with the matter of trust, specifically the trust that the world is populated by caring people who, if you are in trouble, would not simply stand by and watch you die. It's the trust that the good people outnumber the bad ones and that the person who treated you horribly when you held up the checkout line was the exception rather than the rule.
I've always had a problem with trust, I freely admit. Journalism during my formative years was just an enabler. ("If your mother tells you she loves you--check it out." So goes the favorite J-school saying.) Then, years of observing the bad behavior of my fellow humans solidified my opinions. People are rotten. I'm right to mistrust them. As I grew older, my cynicism took such a hold that I found I didn't have the right stuff to be either a convincing hippie or a free market capitalist.
Then this weekend, along comes a story that makes me more...it changes my...well, I don't know how it makes me feel. Optimistic isn't exactly right.

The story was about Kitty Genovese, the New York girl who was murdered in the street 45 years ago. Her murder shocked the country because it was widely reported that 38 residents of nearby apartments witnessed it but no one tried to intervene.
I remember this story because it was one of the first news stories I ever paid any attention to. It happened in 1964, when I was eight. My grandparents would quote it endlessly as the reason we should never venture out of our little farming community to a big city. Eventually, it became shorthand for What's Wrong with America These Days. People are rotten. They'll just stand by and watch you die.
The story of Kitty Genovese, as much as anything that ever happened afterward, shaped my world view as a pessimist.

So imagine my surprise when I caught a National Public Radio interview this weekend saying much of the story simply wasn't true. (Listen here.)
Joseph De May, a lawyer living in the area where Kitty was killed, has made something of a hobby of this bit of history. (His web site here.) According to his research, hardly anyone actually saw the attack, which happened in a couple of stages. Some people did hear her scream, and the police were called. In fact, someone did holler out a window to try and scare off the sociopath who stabbed and later raped her. It also casts doubt on the idea that she screamed unaided for a half hour, since she was stabbed in the lungs early on.
De May's theory is that the more sensational aspects--those that he says turned out not to be true--may have been added into the New York Times story's lead by an editor.

So there you have it. The foundation story--the Genesis of my pessimism--is much less horrible than originally thought. True, there were people who heard something wrong and dismissed it too easily. But that's not the same thing as leaning out your apartment window and watching someone die.
How to feel about this? A tiny bit comforted, I guess. Despite all the free-form hate floating around talk radio and the Internet, people may not be as bad as I think. I certainly don't want to go too far with this and join the Holocaust deniers. Because yeah, there's still plenty of capacity for the Pol Pots and Idi Amins to do their evil.

But there's room for, I don't know, maybe a little speck of encouragement. Even optimism.