“The one overriding theme I found is that wisdom doesn’t always wear a suit.”
Considering that NBC News correspondent Bob Dotson has traveled more than four million miles during his 40-year career covering American stories, you can trust that he knows what he’s talking about. In fact, his “American Story” segments have won a record six Edward R. Murrow Awards for the best-told news stories on television. He’s now sharing many of those stories in the New York Times best-selling book, “American Story: A Lifetime Search for Ordinary People Doing Extraordinary Things.”
During an interview with me on Christopher Closeup, Dotson explained his positive approach to journalism in an industry that often makes you feel like the world is going to hell because it’s filled with unsolvable problems.
He said, “You turn on TV these days and [always see] celebrity experts – and you wonder when they have time to actually learn about anything because they’re always on TV. Our media is a mirror that reflects the powerful and the popular culture. . . But I thought, ‘Why don’t we prop up the mirror and look in the shadows because maybe Uncle Henry or Aunt Mary or Great Grandpa has already solved this problem?’ . . . If we’ve gone several generations now where we just assume that the only people who have answers or solutions are people who are in power, then we’re overlooking people who may have already solved the challenges we still face.”
One case in point is Jack McConnell, a doctor who retired to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. During a conversation with one of the island’s 6,000 working poor, Dr. McConnell discovered that most of them couldn’t afford medical care, so they would go to the hospital emergency room whenever they were sick. The physician knew that ER visits were the most expensive way to administer medical treatment. It was fine if you broke a leg, but inefficient if you just needed a basic check-up or preventive care.
Dr. McConnell asked his fellow retired doctors, “Why don’t we open up a clinic and volunteer?” Their initial response was that they had gotten out from under burdensome insurance costs and didn’t want to open themselves up to lawsuits.
Dotson described what happened next: “[Jack McConnell] realized that almost every state in the union has what they call a Good Samaritan law. That means if you or I had a traffic accident and we’re lying on the side of the road and a doctor stopped to help, you could not then turn around and sue the doctor for helping you. So Jack went to the South Carolina legislature and said, ‘You could extend the theory of this to volunteer clinics because all we’re going to be doing is giving out flu shots and making sure kids have glasses, that sort of thing.’ So he got it passed. He ended up getting 40 or 50 doctors to start this clinic. . .Today, they have free clinics like that in 44 states because of what Jack McConnell figured out. That’s the whole point of the book. You don’t have to wait to become the American Cancer Society to do something; you could just do it.
There’s no doubt Dr. Jack McConnell is living out the Christopher message, whether he’s aware of it or not. By sharing his story and many others, Bob Dotson is doing the same thing.
(This essay is a recent “Light One Candle” column, written by Tony Rossi, of The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.)
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