Running for Your Life: On Being Political

A brief history for Day 2 of President-Elect Trump

Back in the distant past, I went to college. I was a family anomaly, and while high school teachers advised me to indulge my love for the liberal arts, my working class instincts took over. Rather than pursuing Shakespeare and theater arts, I opted for what I saw as a parallel profession and studied journalism, with a concentration in political science.

My first big news job was at the Windsor Star. As assistant night news editor in 1985, it was my job to rewrite stories – even the critical front-page ones, when necessary ! – and come up with snappy headlines. I loved that type of work. I still do – although now at the New York Post – thirty-one years later.

I remember when – for the first time at the Star – the top editors decided to lead the paper with political poll results. I was shocked and outraged. Before then, polls were regarded as stale window dressing. Meaty reporting on ideas, themes and relevant social-political history was what I loved to sink my teeth into. Damn the day, I thought at the time, when polling of the people who actually answered the pollsters – the bored, the lonely and the depressed, as a childhood friend of mine who freelanced for a polling concern had told me – would account for serious journalism.  I felt so strongly about it that I began to resent being associated with a public service that stooped that low, was that lazy.

I wasn’t alone in this line of thinking. One of my favorite quotes from a politician was by former Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker (1895-1979). He wasn’t doing as well in these new polls as the pundits expected, and he was asked by a reporter about what he thought about this emerging fixation by news outlets.

I paraphrase: “Every dog should piss on one.”

Next: Running for Your Life: Leaf It to Me

Running for Your Life: Please Come

Fifteen years ago the flow of foreign visitors didn’t stop. In fact, in seeming solidarity toward us New Yorkers in shock over the unspeakable Twin Towers attack, a vast majority of people didn’t cancel their travel plans to the US because of security concerns. They came to show their support. So that, as we said at the time, we would not let the terrorists win.

Today I feel a similar sense of shock, a numbing flashback. Never has a presidential candidate seemed so at home with sexist and racist language, bullying, and encouraging the same, if not worse, from his supporters. What’s more horrifying, the ugly tactics have paid off.  That candidate, after the results of Tuesday’s vote, is now president-elect. He will be inaugurated in January.

My simple plea? Foreign visitors, don’t cancel your travel plans to America in protest of this vote that appears to speak to the worst side of human nature. Now, more than ever, those of us who lived through the nightmare of US Vote 2016 – so damn similar to a terrorist attack on our very moral soul – need your support.

Don’t cancel your plans. Come to America. Like beloved Yogi Berra famously said, it is Déjà vu all over again. We need to see the compassion and intelligent understanding in your eyes  just like we did in 2001.

Next: Running for Your Life: Leaf It to Me

Running for Your Life: One Day More!

Pardon the Les Miserables song reference, but isn't it apropos to conjure up images of revolution in the hours before we Americans go to the polls during this bizarrely contentious election cycle?

Here’s what it boils down to in my mind:

If politics are forever infected with false news, those who would stop at nothing to erect as sacrosanct a partisan view of the truth, what is the public interest? Or has it always been a hollow construct serving the lie that there is validity in truth-seeking?

A T-shirt that is making the rounds in Trump America gives me pause as I tap out these thoughts. ROPE. TREE. JOURNALIST.  Some Assembly Required.

And so we vote. And if you think Nov. 9 will bring sunshine, strawberries and a clear path ahead, then I’ve got a stone-arch bridge over the East River I’d like to sell you.

Next: Running for Your Life: Leaf It to Me

Running for Your Life: Sand County Almanac

It’s five days and counting until the US election, and yes, for reasons that I won’t get into here because EVERYONE and his dog is getting into it, this is the most important election the modern world has ever seen. (I know, but believe it or not, grandiosity is called for).

That’s why I couldn’t be happier to be reading for the first time Aldo Leopold’s nature classic, “A Sand County Almanac.” http://bit.ly/2esfyey Here’s the theme, as written by Leopold 67 years ago:

“It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of the species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.”

Get that? A kinship with fellow-creatures? Wow! Live and let live? Not, fight dirty and dirtier. Brook no quarter. Don’t be a loser.

Be a winner this election season. Pick up a copy of “Sand County Almanac” and take a quiet breath, if only for the length of time it takes to read this 226-page treasure.

Next: Running for Your Life: Leaf It to Me

Running for Your Life: Trolls at Halloween

What Halloween would be complete without a little scare – well, actually, a big scare.

That would be trolls. The internet variety.

A big pre-election thanks goes to writer Jared Keller and the Village Voice for his cautionary tale on trolls. http://bit.ly/2eNhE9r.

When it comes to just what makes news these days (Yes, I’m a member of an endangered species: the newspaper worker), look no further than the trolls.

If only – like the kiddie trolls who come to trick or treat at your door tonight – they will vanish with the dawn. But as Keller warns us, unless there is a hard reckoning of common sense, the trolls of the internet will continue to bear down on civil society like a late season hurricane.

Next: Running for Your Life: Sand County Almanac