There is good to be found in tragedy, if we look

In this -- the era of computer-generated "reality" -- there is much to celebrate when real-life drama ends heroically.

Most of us alive on the planet the past two or three weeks have been following every scrap of information coming from a complex of caves in Thailand. That is where a dozen young soccer players and their coach were stranded in a life-or-death drama for days and days.

With thanks to God for their rescue, all of the boys and their young coach are safe and sound.

We also give thanks for the too short life of the expert diver who died as preparations were being made to safely extract the soccer team from the flooded cave.

Too much of heroism these days, it seems, is the made-up kind portrayed in blockbuster movies about made-up characters who save made-up victims caught in made-up catastrophes on which the fate of a made-up world hinges.

The cave-trapped soccer team in Thailand is real. Those boys dealt with real terror, including days of total darkness with no food except for a few snacks while the menacing water around them ebbed and flowed.

Now that the drama in Thailand has been replaced as the top story of the hour, there is time for reflection, for recalling the events of other rescues that appeared, at the time, to be all but impossible.

Those of us who were around in 1987 remember Baby Jessica McClure. The child fell into a well in Midland, Texas, where she was trapped for 58 hours while rescuers figured out the best life-saving tactics.

In this case, cutting a rescue shaft from hard rock led rescuers to Jessica, and she was pulled from her precarious entrapment with what are considered to be minor injuries. One of her toes was amputated after gangrene set in due to loss of circulation. She had a few other medical issues, relatively speaking.

Jessica, who was 18 months old at the time of her ordeal, says she has no memory of those events that were so closely followed around the world.

Let's call this a miracle.

Some 23 years later -- in 2010 -- the world's attention was gripped by another underground disaster when 33 Chilean miners were trapped for 69 days as rescuers attempted to devise a safe extraction system.

In the end, a shaft big enough for a capsule loaded with human cargo was created. While the miners waited they were supplied with food and water. But just imagine 69 days trapped in a mine. All 33 miners were rescued.

Let's call this a miracle.

It doesn't take modern news media -- the same news media that have nearly instantaneous access to any world event -- very long to move on to fresh topics.

Take a look at what's happening around the globe. Vast areas of the western United States are choked with smoke from wildfires. Vast areas of other parts of the world are threatened by monsoons and flooding.

It's as if our fragile planet has become a giant Rubik's cube, and we are unable to line up the squares so that heavy rain falls on out-of-control wildfires.

By now, I hope, the 12 soccer-loving boys and their coach in Thailand have been reunited with families and loved ones. Just imagine the agony of not knowing if your son is alive or dead, then experiencing the elation when news comes all of the players are alive, then the agony of waiting while a rescue effort is mounted, then being kept from hugging and kissing your rescued child for fear of infection and contamination.

As my wife commented: Just let them try to keep me from my sons after an experience like that.

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Update on the cicadas/locusts: Several of you were kind enough to let me know that the cicadas are indeed here. My friend Ford who raised the issue last week sent an e-mail this week saying the familiar nighttime singing has returned to the woods around his house -- considerably later in the year than normal.

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All is well with the world. Boys trapped in a flooded cave are rescued. Cicadas have returned.

This would be a good time to repeat the Prayer of St. Francis:

Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is

hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where

there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where

there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where

there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to

be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is

in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we

are born to eternal life.

Amen.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.