Want good news? Here are some bad events that don't happen much anymore

You hear it all the time. In fact, you've probably said it: "The world is getting crazier all the time. There's so much bad news. It's depressing."

Sure, we're in the third year of a pandemic (four, if you count 2019, when it actually started). There's unprecedented division in American politics. There are insane weather events every few months. There are school shootings virtually every month.

But it could be worse. Much worse, because it was worse in my childhood. This isn't a "back in my day, we really had it rough" column. No, wait. I guess it is.

It's also an attempt to note that four scary things that dominated the news in the 1970s and early 1980s rarely happen now – and we don't realize it.

Kidnappings for ransom. When was the last time you heard about someone being abducted and held for ransom? This was a regular thing back in the day. Someone famous would be taken by armed men and held in exchange for $1 million or the release of prisoners or something else. Sure, there was Patty Hearst, but there was also John Paul Getty and Aldo Moro and all those kids on that school bus in Chowchilla. Stranger abductions still happen, but not for ransom.

Skyjackings. You couldn't get through a week in the 1970s without there being a plane hijacked (cleverly called "skyjacked"). Maybe to Cuba, which seemed crazy. Maybe to Rome.  Maybe to an African country. Heck, D.B. Cooper became a legend by hijacking a plane in Portland, getting $200,000 and jumping out over southwestern Washington. When was the last time you heard about a plane being hijacked? Sept. 11, 2001, changed everything. Now we have intense security at airports and anyone who hijacks a plane is much more likely to be killed by the other passengers than to arrive safely at their destination. Skyjackings have largely disappeared from our consciousness. There were 130 American skyjackings between 1968 and 1972. You know how many American airplanes have been skyjacked since Sept. 11, 2001? Zero.

Plane crashes. Some still happen, but did you know that there were two U.S. commercial plane crashes in 2021, both minor (at least to those of us not onboard)? Compare that to 40 years ago, when there were seven fatal crashes of American commercial airliners, killing a combined 195 passengers. Heck, for much of my childhood, it felt like a rock star was killed in a plane crash every couple of months. There has been one passenger fatality in a U.S. commercial airline crash since 2019. Planes almost never crash.

Serial killers. When was the last time you heard about a serial killer? I guess it could be happening, but we would likely notice it. Think about the 1970s and 1980s, when we had a stream of serial killers. There was Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. There was Juan Corona and Jeffrey Dahmer. There was Richard Ramirez and Wayne Williams. There was even the Zodiac killer, who we never identified. Was there something about that era that led to serial killers?

So yeah, the news is often bad. It feels gloomy. But look on the sunny side: Plane crashes, skyjackings, kidnapping for ransom and serial killers have virtually stopped.

That's one bit of the past that isn't worth nostalgia.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.