No Campaigns for Me

 As part of the discussion of my most recent letter to the editor of our local paper, a friend asked if I had considered running for office. At one time, when I was younger, not long after we first moved here, I did...but decided against it for two reasons:

1. I was a brand-new resident with only a passing knowledge of local issues (and only one, the new high school, in which I had a passionate interest);

2. I would be a Democrat in what was then an overwhelmingly Republican community, with about as much chance to win an election as I would have to win a marathon (in fact, my odds in the marathon might have been better).

Today, I know more about the community (after living here for 20 years), I am better known in the community (thanks to those letters in part), the community is more evenly split politically (although the township and school board governments are still 100% Republican), but I am still reluctant. Mostly, I think I'm too old now. If the Democrats are going to crack the GOP hold on the township (as they did the county government last year), they will want and need young people to run, so that they can hold office for a long time and maybe even form a base for higher office. I'm almost 70; IMO, too old to begin a political career.

So, my political activities will be limited to supporting candidates I believe in and writing scathing letters to the paper.

Editorial Commentary

 First off, for the record, the local paper ran the letter I posted here yesterday in this morning's edition. Which leads me to today's topic:

Do you ever write to your local paper? (For those in big cities, this might be a tough call.) How often? Do your letters get published? My letter-writing career locally began not long after we first moved here, as the school district was planning a new high school building and there was a very vocal minority opposed to the plan. I started by speaking up at school board meetings defending the plan and then started writing to the paper whenever something was published by one of the opponents. I became so well known for my stand on the issue, I was interviewed by a reporter for a feature article about the controversy. (The new school was, indeed, built, and is now about 18 years old.)

After that, I started writing whenever there was something I felt strongly about. Unfortunately, the paper carries two very conservative local columnists (one of them is Christine Flowers, of whom I complained yesterday), and I frequently find my dander raised by their opinions. In fact, I have to stop myself from writing in opposition to their every column, for fear of being termed a mere crank. (They used to have a liberal columnist, too, but budget cuts caused them to stop paying these freelance writers; the two conservatives, who have lucrative full-time gigs--Flowers is a lawyer--continued to work for free, the liberal frankly admitted she couldn't justify the commitment to a regular weekly column without being paid. She still occasionally contributes an op-ed.)

I can't remember a time when my letter was not published. I am, probably, more articulate than many of their citizen correspondents, but I am proud to be able to represent the more liberal view as often as I can.

The Middle-Class Bubble, Revisited

 The Delaware County Daily Times published my letter today (the one I also posted here); strangely enough, they also published a letter from a friend, Paul Kerrigan, who expressed some of the same objections to Mr. McOscar's conclusions, though from a different angle (and no, neither of us knew the other was going to write to the paper on the topic). Paul wrote, in part:

...in Nether Providence where I was an observer, the local Judge of Elections confirmed what appeared to be true, that two contiguous wards had about a 5 to 1 disparity in the number of voters being served. The one ward had no line to speak of, while the voters in the adjacent ward consistently had a wait of an hour or more. Interestingly, the under-served voting ward was the one that had the apartment complex, as opposed to the single home properties in the first. I’m not saying that there was malicious intent, but the nearly all white voters in one ward were impressive when compared with the diverse voters who made up the other.

These subtle discrepancies reinforce the historical racism of the red-lining and de facto segregation of the past. 

Always good to know you are not alone in your thoughts. 

 

Living in a Middle-Class Bubble

 This morning, my local paper, the Delaware County Daily Times, ran an op-ed, which spurred me to write this letter to the editor:

To the editor:

Clearly, Jerry McOscar lives in a white, middle-class bubble and doesn't understand how his life differs from those who may be poor, non-white, elderly, or otherwise "out of the mainstream".

In his op-ed on Tuesday, after outlining the problems that Julie Berger, a Senior Research Coordinator at University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, observed at a polling place in West Philadelphia--problems that included an inability to locate the proper polling place, long lines, and difficulty in understanding how to operate the ballot scanning machine--McOscar wrote:

"The truth is that most of these purported 'obstacles' are easily remedied by a little pre-election day homework — reading sample ballots, verifying the proper polling place, checking paperwork, voting early if work is an issue, for example. Ms. Berger even admits to being confused at times when voting in person.

"She asserts that voter suppression can take blatant forms, but its more insidious forms can be hard to see for those, like her, who have always exercised their voting rights easily: a labyrinth of registration forms and deadlines, a hard-to-read ballot, 'complex' voting machines, mismatched polling books."

What McOscar fails to acknowledge is that that kind of "homework" may require an access to the internet, or a library, or even the skills to utilize either, that may not be commonplace in areas like West Philly, especially among the poor and elderly. Has he not heard of the "digital divide"? Further, it may require a time and effort that even a younger person, working two or more jobs, holding together a single-parent household, simply cannot manage.

 
I'm a senior citizen who was an "early adapter" to the computerized world, thanks to working in the publishing industry in my youth; but when I took a part-time job in a supermarket in my later years, I discovered a wide swath of people of all ages and races who had difficulty operating a self-checkout or understanding how our loyalty card system operated.

Mr. McOscar needs to realize that what he finds simple and easy may not be for everyone.

Investigative Journalism in the On-Line Future

 A question that arose in a conversation with my wife this morning:

Can long-form investigative journalism, the kind portrayed in the movie Spotlight, the kind that takes months of work by a team of reporters, survive in a future where the daily print newspaper no longer exists? In a world where everyone gets their news from TV and/or on-line sources--even if those on-line sources are what used to be the print papers?

I don't think so. On-line journalism relies on getting eyeballs--beyond regular subscribers--onto the advertising it sells. That requires having a major eye-catching headline every day--click-bait, for want of a better term. It hasn't got the time or the money to have a half-dozen well-paid reporters working for weeks, let alone months, on a story that may never pan out or, even if it does, may not garner the national attention needed to generate new readers and therefore new revenue. Even more than the daily newspaper, the daily on-line news source depends on the immediate, the now.

Related to this is the decline in local reporting. Without print newspapers, where will the public get the information on county or small municipal government, including things like school boards? If my local county-based paper is any indication, it won't. It has trimmed its staff to the bone, even to firing all the "stringers" who used to cover the local municipal meetings. It has more people covering high school sports than school boards. I've had friends say that local, unpaid "reporters" will take up the slack--but who will make sure they are reporting accurately and fairly, without editors to check? Imagine a generation of young "Drudges" being in charge of what you know about your local represenatives.

I fear for the concept of an informed electorate in a decade or so.

A Surfeit of Memorials--2

I hadn't intended to give two days to this topic, but this morning's newspaper spurred me to write an addendum.

This morning our local paper, the Delaware County Daily Times, devoted five full pages (not counting the front page) to covering the local 9/11 memorials. That was virtually its entire "news hole," as the journalistic usage goes. I find it hard to believe that, in a county of more than 500,000, nothing else of note occurred in the past 24 hours--no fires, no crimes of any kind, no political activity at all? I should also point out that the Daily Times also runs news about neighboring areas--Philadelphia, Chester and Montgomery counties, even the state of Delaware--there was nothing newsworthy in any of those areas on September 11, 2020?

This is what I mean when talk about a "surfeit of memorials."

Updates

1. Updating yesterday's entry on baseball: there is now at least one more team out of action, the St. Louis Cardinals, who had several staff test positive on Thursday. Whether that will affect the team they played earlier in the week, the Minnesota Twins, remains to be seen.

2. Updating Thursday: The heat wave here has broken, after thunderstorms Thursday night and rain nearly all day Friday. Now, we're waiting to see how much we're affected by Hurricane Isaias. (Ad how are your local broadcasters doing with pronouncing that one? Consensus here seems to "Ee-sigh-as".)

3. Updating Wednesday: Thursday's paper did not include all the things missing from Wednesday's edition--except the classified ads and death notices (which are paid for, so they have to run them). It did however include, again, the "special section" aimed at senior citizens, which ran complete--as near as I can tell--in Wednesday's paper.

Morning Screw-ups

I have a morning routine. I suspect most of us do.

Mine is that I bring in the local paper that was dropped in my driveway, make breakfast, and while I eat, read the paper (with Morning Joe on in the background). After I've eaten, I do the puzzles in the paper--the crossword and "Celebrity Cypher".

The last two mornings that routine has been disrupted. Yesterday, the paper wasn't there on the driveway. This has happened a few times in the past month, and always on a Tuesday. I'm beginning to suspect that, on Tuesday, there's someone who passes the house and swipes the paper. (Part of my reasoning on this is that last Tuesday, when there was no paper, was the day the delivery bill would normally be included. I can't imagine my delivery person neglecting to deliver the paper and the bill.)

Today was even stranger. The paper was there...but, by my reckoning, only half of it. The index on the inside front page lists 64 pages of contents. The paper, as delivered, has only 32 pages. Among the missing pages: comics, syndicated columns, puzzles, and sports. Yes, the entire sports section, including the back page which is usually the sports headline story, is not there.

I went around the corner to the local convenience store...and all their copies were identical to mine and they said they had already put in a complaint. I plan to as well.