Are you calling the train wreck a "good thing that happened"? I don't think even Dietrich would go that far... We can probably agree that neither this author nor his audience care much for "nuance", which presumably in this context means that each community in some sense "pulled together"? In one case they pulled together for several hours, in the other case it was forty years. In both cases they pulled together for a good cause, so I don't see a "counterpoint"?