“Where is the good news?” my son asked the other day, the kind of simple question that can only come from a child.

Obvious, sensical, trusting. He still believes in our essential goodness and still wants to know about humanity’s small kindnesses and large achievements.

We had been talking about doomscrolling on the way to school, our very modern addiction to pain and suffering.

“People want to know what’s happening in the world — sometimes,” I had explained, unable to stop myself from adding the caveat, admitting my repulsion at current events.

My children wanted to know if there were other happenings, not sad or scary things but thrilling and heartwarming news.

“It’s there, but you have to look for it,” I said. I found myself heeding my own advice later that day. I discovered, inexplicably, sites devoted to good news and positive stories. I scanned them greedily.

And that’s how I learned that the bison are back.

More than 150 years after the last wild one was spotted in the United States, a small herd of six — three females, three males — was reintroduced in Illinois, reclaiming their place on the prairie they had once roamed, millions-strong.

“We have stories that begin with: ‘Back in the times when all things spoke,'” Santee Sioux elder Robert Wapahi told reporters gathered to watch the bison’s release on a cold January day. He said the phrase was the native version of “once upon a time.”

It seems that to go forward now, we must go back; Back to the time when all things spoke, when all things were connected. We are separated now and it’s killing us, slowly in some places and quickly in others.

But we can always go back to what has worked for us before, when humans faced danger.

Six years before the last wild bison was seen on the prairie, a man stood on a battlefield in Pennsylvania and delivered a humble speech.

“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he said. “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

Just a few months earlier than that, thousands of men had died on that battlefield, testing which side of that proposition our country would come down on. We had declared on July 4, 1776, that the truths of mankind’s natural equality were self-evident, but they were not then and never have been, self-effectuating.

Humans have had cause, again and again, to revisit old debates. We fight the same wars, wars that determine who we will be. Each time, we choose a side or one is chosen for us.

The winning side in our civil war had fought to protect the unity of our country, deciding that in some matters, we could not agree to disagree.