If you want to know what happened today, you don't have to turn on the tube. I will be happy to tell you right now, no extra charge.

Ready? Here goes: What happened today is about what happened yesterday. And the day before. Namely:

Four billion people went to work or took care of their kids. They cooked food, paid bills, washed clothes, handled problems, had a few laughs, did most of their chores, and got enough sleep to face tomorrow.

That's the stuff of real life. But don't expect your favorite news anchor to report something so majorly boring.

Instead, you will be told that a house burned down, a kid was abducted, Congress is working on yet another outrageous law, some deadly trend has been noticed, the Mets are in trouble, and the Jews and Arabs once again failed to see eye to eye.

The media have an agenda: They want to keep you nervous. Their ratings go up each time the world comes near The End. When their lead story is a pop star checking into rehab, you know they're having a bad day.

In a land where the average American child has seen 16,000 murders on television by age 18, truth and goodness are in Outer Snoresville. Violence and evil are more exciting. But when you finally turn off the television at midnight after the last Borg or Klingon has been vaporized and the last stocking-capped punk has been stabbed with his own knife and the last '74 Dodge has gone up in an orange fireball, you are left in the burnt-out silence to mourn with singer Peggy Lee: Is that all there is?

No, Peggy, there is far more – and there always was. As famed historians Will and Ariel Durant bravely admitted:

We must remind ourselves again that history as usually written ... is quite different from history as usually lived ... Behind the red facade of war and politics, misfortune and poverty, adultery and divorce, murder and suicide, were millions of orderly homes, devoted marriages, men and women kindly and affectionate, troubled and happy with children. Even in recorded history we find so many instances of goodness, even of nobility, that we can forgive, though not forget, the sins.

The gifts of charity have almost equaled the cruelties of battlefields and jails. How many times, even in our sketchy narratives, we have seen men helping one another – Farinelli providing for the children of Domenico Scarlatti, diverse people succoring young Haydn, Conte Litta paying for Johann Christian Bach's studies at Bologna, Joseph Black advancing money repeatedly to James Watt, Puchberg patiently lending and lending to Mozart. Who will dare to write a history of human goodness?

Who indeed? Where are the historians and journalists who are chronicling our victory? History is more than what today's textbooks say.

Evangelical lodestar Philip Yancey realized that something was amiss when in 2004 he read a report claiming that, "little has changed since 1980. It reported that 80 percent of the world's people still live in substandard housing, 70 percent are unable to read, and 50 per cent suffer from malnutrition." (Thanks to the Internet, slop like this has achieved eternal life.)

So he dug up the real facts (Christianity Today, May 2004, Page 88):

• In just 30 years, illiteracy has plunged from 53 percent to 20 percent.

• Malnutrition has dropped from 50 percent to 20 percent.

• Only 25 percent, not 80 percent, have substandard housing now.

• Lack of clean water now afflicts 25 percent of the world – down from 75 percent.

• "Experts once forecast that world population would hit a high of 20 billion, causing an intolerable strain on Earth's resources. That prediction was lowered to 15 billion, then 11 billion, then 9 billion."

• "Thirty years ago, one in eight children died in their first year of life; now half that proportion dies."

• Leprosy has declined greatly, polio is almost gone, and smallpox, the dreaded killer of 500 million, has vanished from the planet.

• World per capita income is up 60 percent while extreme poverty has fallen almost in half.

• In the United States, the teenage birth rate has dropped 30 percent in 10 years.

• All in all, things in backward countries have improved more in the last 50 years than in the previous 500.

My thanks to Phil for reminding us that good is outrunning evil at flank speed. To his fine numbers, I've added a few of my own in my newest book, "The Meaning of Life," from which I've excerpted and adapted the above. It will be available in April.

Sure, we've got troubles, but the Big Picture is overwhelmingly positive.