The Headlines Don’t Bury Themselves

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but stories these days have a strange way of disappearing. Now, I’m not talking about fairy tales you heard as a kid that get replaced by the next bedtime adventure. I’m talking about hard news — the kind of events that shape a community, scar families, and ought to make the rest of us pause.

Take the murders in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan. Brutal. Real people, real lives ended, and for a few minutes, the headlines shouted the news. But if history is any guide, you’d better grab those headlines, because they’ll soon vanish. It’s like watching smoke from a campfire — it swirls around for a moment, maybe even stings your eyes, and then it’s gone into thin air.

Now, why is that?

Well, it’s because this story doesn’t fit the mold. Doesn’t fit the preferred narrative, as the polite ones say. If it had all the right pieces — the villain painted in red, the villain holding the “wrong” political sign, the villain tied to the “wrong” crowd — then we’d have endless candlelight vigils on television, panels of experts pontificating, politicians thundering about new laws, and headlines that never die.

But when the villain has “F*ck Trump” spray-painted in his yard? When he’s tossing his money into the coffers of Act Blue like a man feeding bread to pigeons? Well, suddenly the “motive” becomes as mysterious as the Loch Ness Monster. And the line they hand us, straight-faced, is: “We still don’t have a motive.”

Friends, that’s about as believable as telling me a coyote knocked on my door last night to borrow a cup of sugar.

The truth has a way of wearing muddy boots. It trudges into the clean, polished halls of media and politics, leaving tracks they’d rather not mop up. So instead of dealing with it, they pretend the mud isn’t there. They’ll rope it off, slap on a fresh coat of paint, and tell us not to stare too hard.

But I’ve lived long enough to know that mud doesn’t just disappear. It dries, it cracks, and eventually it falls where everyone can see it. And the truth, no matter how the media tries to bury it, still has a way of working its way back to the surface — sometimes years later, sometimes too late for anyone to remember who got hurt.

That’s the trouble. The people who lost loved ones in Grand Blanc Township aren’t going to forget. They can’t. But the rest of us — if we rely on the headlines — we’ll lose the memory as quickly as the next football score or celebrity scandal hits the screen.

I’m certain the national press could have had careers in magic. They’ve perfected the art of distraction. With one hand, they wave a story right in front of us, big and bold. With the other hand, they’re already slipping the narrative into their pocket, ready to pull out something shinier, something that fits the act.

I’ll give them this–they’re good at it. But at some point, you get tired of being tricked. You want to see what’s up the sleeve. You want to know what disappeared into the pocket.

And when it comes to tragedies like this, what they’re hiding isn’t a rabbit or a scarf. It’s motive, it’s connection, it’s accountability. And that, friends, is no magic trick. That’s just dishonesty.

I once knew a rancher who said, “If you step in cow manure, don’t call it mud.” Now that’s common sense. But you wouldn’t believe how many people would rather twist their tongues into knots than admit they stepped in something they shouldn’t have.

The same is true here. The signs in the shooter’s yard, the donations he made — those things paint a picture. They don’t excuse his crime, but they do explain a motive. Anger, politics, hatred. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to piece it together. Yet we’re told we don’t know. We can’t and mustn’t know.

Friends, when a man leaves breadcrumbs on the table, you don’t need a master chef to tell you what he had for lunch.

Now here’s where I put the brakes on. Because it’s easy to get worked up about lies and cover-ups, to shake our fists and stew over the unfairness of it all. But life isn’t meant to be lived in a constant state of frustration.

The truth is, the media has been burying stories since the ink first hit paper. Politicians have been lying since the first campaign speech. And somehow, through all of that, ordinary folks like you and me have managed to live, love, raise families, and even laugh.

I take comfort in that. Because while the “big shots” manipulate headlines, real life is happening outside their reach. The kindness of a neighbor, the honesty of a child, the resilience of families — those things never make the headlines, but they’re more real than anything printed in black ink.

And they remind me that while lies can swirl around like a storm, they don’t have the power to sink the whole ship. Not if we keep our faith, not if we hang on to hope, not if we keep speaking truth even when it’s inconvenient.

So, what do we do when headlines bury themselves? When truth gets smothered under layers of spin?

We do the same thing our grandparents did before the age of instant news: we talk to each other. We pass along what we know. We teach our kids to think critically, to question kindly, to look twice before believing once.

We live honest lives in a dishonest world. We keep muddy boots by the door and don’t apologize for the truth they carry in. We remember the victims long after the headlines fade. We refuse to let their stories get erased.

And most importantly, we hold fast to the belief that truth still matters, that even if it gets buried, even if it takes years, even if no one in power wants it to surface — it will.

I expect the murders in Grand Blanc Township to fade from the headlines, the official line to remain “no motive,” and the story to get buried alongside too many others.

But I don’t expect the truth to stay hidden forever. Lies have short legs; they can’t run far. Truth, on the other hand, might limp along slowly, but it always finishes the race.

So, let the headlines bury themselves. You and I — we’ll remember. We’ll keep our faith. We’ll laugh at the absurdity without surrendering to it. And we’ll live our lives in such a way that when truth finally does break through, we’re not surprised, but ready.

Because muddy boots or not, truth belongs on the floor of every home in this nation.