President’s Message, December 2021

by Tony Norman, NSNC President

You could be forgiven for believing that in the final weeks of November, everything was going to Hell. Speaking strictly for myself, I’ve had to consciously fight off a nagging weariness when sitting down to write my column.
What’s the point of cleverly turning phrases or even penetrating insights when folks are more stubbornly resistant to logic or persuasion than ever before?

There’s a temptation to give in to the despair of the moment. I experience this all the time because I write about topical political and cultural issues that impinge upon race, crime and the systemic failures of simply being human. Just think about some of the biggest stories many columnists were writing about last month:

A teenage vigilante was exonerated by a jury after killing two assailants and wounding a third with an AR-15-like weapon he was not legally supposed to own, much less use during a time of volatile civil unrest. This same young man then became the center of a bidding war by cynical politicians who offered him a job on their congressional staffs because he allegedly embodies their ideal of American manhood.

A celebrated athlete who is also a notorious vaccine refusenik contracted Covid, but looked to a notorious podcaster for medical advice instead of heeding the guidance of actual medical professionals. 

Meanwhile, school shootings have begun creeping up in frequency again. Inflation is eviscerating the poor and the bottom portion of the middle class. A widely used timeline for estimating impending environmental catastrophes appears to have been too conservative because the worst-case scenarios are happening now. 

Fears that the cold war between China and the U.S. could flare into a hot war over Taiwan inched closer to reality. The Russians are testing satellite-killing technologies in space and creating orbiting debris fields that threaten the International Space Station and the world’s network of communications satellites. The Omicron variant is now tied with inflation as the average American’s biggest worry.

The usual institutions that used to give us solace are letting us down. A week doesn’t go by in which preachers and major religious leaders aren’t caught with either their pants down or their hands in the cookie jar. 
In the media, there has been an epidemic of bad behavior. The top cable news network has become a bastion of conspiracy theories. A major cable news anchor will probably lose his job because he abused his resources and squandered his reputation to protect his politician brother who was caught up in a sexual harassment scandal. A once-respected reporter who made her reputation on “60 Minutes” blithely compares the nation’s top epidemiologist to a Nazi butcher.

Oh, yeah, the former president is still out there “insurrecting” and stirring up the disaffected base of a once sane political party. And a large cohort of that party believes violence may be necessary to settle political disputes in the future.

So there’s no sugarcoating it. Things are bad. Given the lack of inspiration from the worlds of politics, culture, religion and sports, things are feeling apocalyptically bad.

But even as we acknowledge the absurdity and craziness of our times, it is important to remember that there’s nothing new about this period of civic rupture and destabilization. Everything we see today humanity has seen before, with the exception of selfies on social media documenting it all. 

In fact, it is impossible to name a time something horrible and outrageous wasn’t happening — including the fabled 1950s — the so-called “good old days” when Jim Crow defined the lives of millions of Black Americans while the economy lifted millions of formerly economically marginalized white Americans into the middle class.

This is where our calling as columnists and opinion writers comes in. We’re called upon to have a sense of history and perspective when everyone else is losing theirs. We’ve been elected to stare into the darkness. Our job is to wrestle order out of chaos and shine a light on those recovered pieces of broken reality using all the wit and humanity at our disposal.

In small and big ways, our job as columnists and opinion writers is to ask tough questions that will always defy easy answers. It is also our job to acknowledge that we live in a world flooded with nuance and impermanence. Nothing is as complicated or simple as it seems. Our reality is messy and hard to fully wrap our arms around, especially when so many things are rushing at us at once.

Our job is also to take special notice of the humanity of those we write about. So many people are unabashedly despicable, but there’s no rule that says that we have to continually write about them. There are wonderful people and wonderful things happening in the world, too. It’s easy to lose track of them in the rush to be titillated by outrage.

Perhaps, the most fitting description of what we as columnists are called to do is contained in the St. Crispin’s Day speech that Shakespeare put in the mouth of Henry V before the Battle of Agincourt. Let’s reframe that speech for our times, shall we?:

“We few; we happy few; we band of columnists and opinion writers! The columnist who sweats blood with us shall be our comrades; however humble they may be — syndicated or not, these days will elevate their status because they dared face the challenges of the blank page during dark times head-on.

“Those columnists yet to be born will consider themselves deprived because they were not here in these, the best of times and the worst of times, dodging and embracing cliches to make a point. How lucky we all are to be here, together, slouching toward whatever the future has in store for us between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.”

We don’t always feel like writing that column that needs to be written either on deadline or not, but we’re obligated to do it. Someone has to put words to the experience of living in what always seems like a unique moment in history.

Journalism has been called the first draft of history. That puts those of us in the NSNC on the frontlines of storytelling with so many of our journalistic colleagues. What an honor we have. We few; we happy few; we band of columnists and opinion writers!