Poosey Digest: Where to find truth

Dear Jacob,

You’ll probably think this is strange getting a letter from me when you live just two doors down the street, but sometimes we just need to put things in writing.

It’s been a joy watching you grow up. I can remember when you and your sister would come down the street pulling your little wagon to sell me flowering plants that you’d dug up from your mother’s back yard. We all had some explaining to do that day. And now that you’re nearly 18 years old and ready to take off to college I wanted you to have this message from the old lady down the street.

This past presidential campaign has been one to remember and 10 years from now my most poignant memories of the election season will not be of the winners and losers but of the talks that you and I have shared in my living room over coffee. Needless to say, we didn’t agree on much. You were as hot for your candidate as I was for mine, and that was my joy, Jacob… listening to a young man truly engaged in politics and on fire for his candidate. Although we had some pretty lively disagreements it was your passion that made me smile inwardly even when I thought you were dead wrong. To find a young man of your age so well informed and fervent in his beliefs was a real encouragement to this old gal.

Okay, one of us won and the other lost. That’s why they call it democracy. I want to tell you that I respect everything you said in the midst of our heated discussions. I mean that, Jacob, and I appreciate the way you kept an open mind when I spoke of how I felt. But in all our wonderfully lively afternoons, there was one thing you said that’s bothered me ever since. Somewhere between my tirade about presidential temperament and your oratory concerning a candidate’s honesty you told me that this idea of freedom of the press is getting out of hand. I think my heart stopped. You went on to say that the press should be banned from the public arena if a candidate objected to what was being covered in the media. That one statement floored me… more than that, it frightened me. Send the president on a long vacation, lock the doors to Congress, and close down the Supreme Court and I’ll worry a bit. But when you mess with the free flow of information, the freedom of the press, then we all should panic.

It’s the age-old battle of whose ox is being gored, my young friend. When Lyndon Johnson lifted his shirt to show his gallbladder scar and then reached down to pull the ears of his dogs, the Democrats howled “Unfair!” When the Washington Post started digging into what happened at the Watergate Hotel the Republicans screamed. The Democrats were unhappy with the way the press tried to find out about Kennedy’s indiscretions and they had a field day with Bill Clinton while conservatives all over the nation claimed that investigating George W’s 40^th birthday binge was unfair. We’re all for a free and open press as long as the Fourth Estate is examining the other guy. Fact is, there have been long periods in our history when a free press has been all that’s kept our democracy afloat. When our right to know gets threatened, all of our rights are in danger.

Yes, yes I know… much of our current mass media is slanted. But it’s our job to purposely listen to the very opinions that make us angry. That’s what you and I did in our living room this summer, Jacob. Thomas Jefferson was in Paris and unable to attend the Continental Congress so he sent his friend, Edward Carrington, to represent Virginia. Among his words of advice were if he had to choose between, “a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” It was the eve of the French Revolution and Jefferson saw first hand what a stifling of the media could do to a nation.

I recently read where over 80% of our adult population gets its news from Facebook. Dear God, that’s like quizzing your dog about Pontiacs. Perhaps even more dangerous than those who wish to curtail our freedom of the press are those who don’t even know where to find the truth. Listen to me, my young friend: all your intelligence and passion will be wasted unless you earnestly seek out and find those sources of information that can be trusted. They are out there. Yes, they are.

Cut down the forest of the free press and the wind will blow so hard that none of us will be able to stand.

You ever ’round Poosey, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.