What’s The Problem With Americans’ Love Of Happy Endings? When It Collides With Real Life

Using as examples the recent reunion – enthusiastically captured and craftily edited by CNN – of a Salvadoran refugee woman with the six-year-old daughter ICE separated from her as well as the cute-turned-creepy-turned-cruel viral tale known as #PlaneBae, Megan Garber considers “how easily the desire for a happy ending can insinuate itself on the facts of the matter. The possibility at play … is that the full story, and its attendant horrors, will get washed away in the easy rituals of false closure. It is that people will forget, because the logic of the happy ending has given them permission to be preoccupied.”