Eight score and a pair of years ago today, in the midst of a bloody civil war, our nation dedicated a national cemetery on the grounds where the Battle of Gettysburg took place a few months earlier. It was a cool autumn day, and in attendance was the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln.
But Lincoln was not the main orator for the event; that honor was accorded to Edward Everett, who prepared a 13,607 word address that lasted two hours. When he was done, Lincoln rose to make some concluding remarks.
He spoke for about two minutes; he used only 271 words. Everett afterward said, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
As much as he was honoring the dead of Gettysburg, Lincoln was speaking to the future of our nation. Once again, we find ourselves engaged in a great civil war of sorts, testing whether this nation, conceived and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, can long endure. Lincoln said:
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
We find ourselves at a strange juncture; our Union is at arguably the greatest risk it’s seen since Lincoln’s time. We’re not fighting in open fields with canon, cavalry, muskets and bayonets, which makes these far more insidious circumstances. Without the physical carnage of bloody bodies, it is not as easy to see the attacks made upon our rule of law by the folks in control, who, in terrible irony, refer to their caucus as the party of Lincoln.
It is for us to honor all who gave the last full measure of devotion that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom.
I’ve been quiet lately, as there has been plenty of noise this past several years of an election season. Today we have a pretty good idea of the results, and the landscape to follow, and, naturally, I have a few cents to offer.
You know the old saw: if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Well, despair is easy, and after the election might feel quite natural. And as we go through this day, the next few weeks, and even years, that old saw will be proven right.
It is also easy to feel betrayed, swindled, let down, and any number of negative thoughts about current events and that, too, is natural.
What is not easy is hope. If the last year, or four, or decade(s) even, have been difficult, let me ask you this: was there still hope yesterday?
I went to bed Tuesday night clueless. Didn’t open the news sites, turn on the radio, watch TV – in fact, I fell asleep to Monty Python’s Flying Circus season 1 episode 8, Full Frontal Nudity. That’s the episode with the dead parrot sketch.
Wednesday morning, I woke up hopeful. Of course, those immediate hopes were dashed to the rocks quickly by the mellifluous tones from NPR’s voices. Perhaps I thought holding off, ripping the Band-Aid® as it were, would be better than 8 years ago. I’m not sure, but I think it was. I got a good night’s sleep, which meant that, as soon as my hopes were dashed, they started stirring again in my rested soul.
According to early results from our Secretary of State’s office, there were 3,077,779 registered voters in my state for the election, and as of Wednesday, 2,137,613 returned ballots. That’s a 69.4% turnout for the state. Not bad – not historically great, but not bad. That might go up a bit with postmarked ballots.
But locally? My own County has 62,063 voters and as of yesterday returned 49,970 ballots. That’s an 80.5% rate of participation (so far).
We did our job locally.
Hope requires something in which to grow, and I shall start there. I feel lucky to be where we live, in a community that, generally, steps up. The rest of the nation is a bitter pill to swallow, but we live here, and we have proven we can – at least – take care of our own. It might not be much, but it is something.
From here in my town, I know my state rep – the outgoing one, who will be our new state AG, and our incoming one, a friend since our kids were together in Kindergarten. I know our state Senator. Even on our city council, I know folks. We take care of ourselves locally, and if that’s all we can do, then at least we are doing what we can.
Which gives me hope.
Hope is hard, but it’s still better than the easy option.
As we enter a year of conflict and disinformation all rolled together with the goo that is politics, it is more important than ever to have access to quality information, if one is to know what’s happening in their world.
This is tough even in the best of circumstances – and we are not now in the best of times for either responsible journalism or for media literacy.
That’s not to say there is not a lot of responsible journalism out there – there is. But the noise to signal ratio is higher than ever, what with the flood of disinformation across (anti)social media sites and the scads of imposter sites that look like news outlets but are only designed to look that way to camouflage propaganda mills.
Put most folks into this information environment, and suddenly the lack of media literacy in our population magnifies the troubles exponentially.
It’s tough – but not impossible. And it begins at home. Literally, in your own home. What do you do to read/watch/hear the news each day? Chances are, it’s going to be done online, which allows you access to more information than ever before – but also allows malefactors more information about what you are looking for and your viewing habits, so they can tailor bogus news to fit nicely into your own, personalized sweet spot.
So, what to do? First: know what you’re consuming for news! It may seem obvious, but knowing the difference between the Washington Post’swebsite and the Washington Examiner’s makes a huge difference in what you are consuming for your daily information intake.
And, yes, every place you go on the web will have a bias of one kind or another. I subscribe to the WaPo even though I know it’s owned by Jeff Bezos (yes, that Jeff Bezos…) – because I know that organization cares about its journalism, and I can trust the veracity of their reportage fare more than, say, the OAN.
Media literacy can be learned. There are excellent resources out there to help decipher what things you read about really mean. All the understanding about the journalism that’s available to you don’t mean squat, however, without quality journalism being available to you in the first place.
And this really does start at home – with the journalism available to you that represents your community. Your local paper. Your local radio station. Hell, even local facething groups and blogs count as local media – and creating quality journalism at the local level takes the support of the community.
That’s why I also support my local public radio stations (plural). They are doing boots-on-the-ground reporting on local and state issues every day, and they deserve my support for that, as I listen to them every damn day to know what’s happening int he world.
You may have noticed that I’m asking for your support for the Eugene Weekly. Click the link for the full story; the short version is just before Christmas the publisher discovered they had been embezzled and had to lay folks off.
The Eugene Weekly is an “alt” weekly – it’s not the biggest paper sold in town, but, given that the biggest paper in town is published elsewhere, it’s literally the only paper made in town. Now, Eugene is not my town – it’s south of here about an hour, but it’s a close enough community that I enjoy the connection offered by the weekly (it’s also my connection when I’m Jonesin’ for a crossword…)
During the pandemic, the paper kept going…thinner, but still going. It has provided an alternative view, of the area; it has provided opportunities for J-school students to do real-world reporting; it has garnered awards and accolades. And its letters are a trip and three-quarters most of the weeks.
Having an outlet for local journalism such as the Weekly makes a city more livable. To have someone gut it in such a cruel and petty manner is even worse than the ways hedge fund board rooms have been gutting newspapers for the past few decades. I mean, yes, the latter is a long, slow, and lingering death of some of the finest newsrooms in the country; but what happened to the Weekly was just a mean, ugly sucker punch below the belt.
At the same time, though, it was kind of a wake-up call.
Once the Weekly was off the street, and folks heard why, the floodgate opened in ways one might not have though imaginable. It’s been described like the scene from It’s A Wonderful Life when the town comes together to bail out the Bailey’s – tens of thousand of dollars (and, yes, you know I gave!) have flowed into the Weekly to make them whole again. The once-great Register Guard has shriveled over the year to a hollow shell of itself, run from the Statesman Journal up in Salem. Over all those years of troubles, the community did not stand up and make its voice heard about the need for the paper.
Faced with the dastardly loss of the Weekly, the community appears to be speaking.
If you can help the Weekly, please do. But if you are somewhere else, what’s your “Weekly”? What have you done for them, lately?
As we enter a year of conflict and disinformation all rolled together with the goo that is politics, it is more important than ever to have access to quality information, if one is to know what’s happening in their world.
