This blog has served many, many purposes; it has been kind
of a catchall for what ever passed through my mind and out of my fingers. I
used to post many times every month and while the postings here have diminished
to less than once a month, the writing has never stopped. Today I am starting
three stories for a local newspaper that I used to work for. Freelance news
writing does not pay much, but writing for the newspaper has reawakened my love
of local news reporting. No, I do not wish to re-enter the field on a full-time
basis, but keeping my hand in it from time to time reconnects me to my youth –
not as a news writer, but as a newspaper delivery boy. While I was probably too
young to understand the vital public interest I was serving, the ancillary benefit
of reading my newspapers as I was carefully folding them, preparing to fling
them at my customers’ doorsteps, has lived with in my soul to this day. There
was no Internet, no cell phones, no personal computers at all – people relied
on their daily newspapers to keep them informed.
Like so many others, I get most of my news today via the
Internet. I prefer sitting down to read my local daily newspaper, but sadly the
days of washing the newsprint off my hands are gone. My news now comes from my
local newspaper’s website as well as many other sources and although I like the
almost unlimited availability of news sources, I really miss holding the paper
in my hands. Oddly enough, I used to write with a typewriter and I do not miss
that at all. I was, in many respects, a “techie,” I was onboard with the
Internet in its early stages and stayed current until the late 90s. Now,
however, I am more accurately a nostalgic techie and an experienced end-user;
the kinds of things I used to know have no current value, but I do know my way
around a computer. Technology has, of course, changed things. This ongoing
rambling of “perspectives, purpose and opinion” would not have happened had
there been no technology to drive it.
I have been around for nearly half a century. The past 50
years have been witness to evolutions and revolutions at a pace perhaps
unprecedented in human history. Yet much remains remarkably the same. Humanity,
while it might appear less humane than ever, still rests on a foundation of
intangibles. There are “things” that exists outside of matter and energy.
Truth, beauty, goodness, justice, love and a host of other intangible things
are real, yet they cannot be quantified. Now, there are some scientists that might
tells us that those things are simply the electrochemical impulses of our
nervous system, that they exist as love, justice or what have you are simply
human creations; they are labels or symbols to describe a physical reality – a
nervous system response to stimuli. Even less appealing – they are instinctive
survival responses. But that explanation does little to explain why love
occurs, why some things are universally beautiful or why injustice is
recognized as such even by those who are the most frequent offenders.
Fifty years is a long time, and I used to look at 50 as
“old.” Now a little more than six months short of that milestone, I do not feel
“old.” In fact, I am doing much of what a man half my age might be doing. I
recently earned BA and MA degrees and I am one year into a PhD program that, if
successful, will have me sporting the title of “Doctor” sometime in 2015. I am
getting married in just six weeks and while I am not new to parenthood, new
children are coming into my life. There is, of course, much more to this story
than this rambling mind-through-fingers symbolic representation, but the very
fact that these words will be read by someone else will help form what they
mean. They are an addition to the wealth of human experience that has been
recorded over the past few thousand years and the more I read of those who have
gone before me, the more I realize how little we have changed. We have adapted
the environment to meet our needs, but we have not conquered the world. We have
technologized much, but that essence that makes us human has not changed one
iota. Paraphrasing Kenneth Burke, we are animals that communicate and
miscommunicate and it is perhaps the latter more than the former that truly
makes us human.
