When a public official stops by my office, they always get a kick out of the sayings I have pinned up on my wall. They are a constant reminder to think, to slow down, and to remember why I got in the newspaper business.
But a comment by a friend who stopped me this week and said, “I am so sorry,” meant a great deal to me. Others at the breakfast table asked me what happened. And my friend who made the comment said, “Well, because those journalists were killed in France.”
Yes, those working at newspapers throughout the world feel some kind of kinship to journalists everywhere.
And our hearts hurt for the remaining office staff of the satirical French magazine “Charlie Hebdo”.
What’s the relationship between my sayings and the shooting? Not a lot for most people, but it is a reminder that we enter the profession for a reason. We want to make a difference in our worlds – whether Buda, Kyle, Dripping Springs, Wimberley ... or Paris.
What are the sayings?
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.”
– Henry David Thoreau
“And, I tell you, I really have so much fun, I ought to be arrested. Sometimes I think it’s wrong of me, because you know, if you’re a newspaperman, as I’ve been since I was fourteen years old, to have your own little paper, it maybe very small, as Daniel Webster said about Dartmouth, ‘It may be a small college, but there are those that live it’ -- to be able to spit in their eye, or do what you think is right, and report the news and have enough readers to make some impact, is such a pleasure, that you forget, you forget, what you’re writing about.
It becomes like, you’re like a journalistic Nero fiddling while Rome burns, or like a small boy covering a hell of a fire. It’s just wonderful and exciting and you’re a cub reporter and God has given you a big fire to cover.
And you forget -- that it’s really burning.”
- I.F. Stone
“What we have, and what we shall have, is the royal American privilege of living and dying in a country town, running a country newspaper, saying what we please when we please, how we please and to whom we please.”
- William Allen White
Emoria (Kansas) Gazette
Dec. 6, 1911
“Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized anyway.”
- Eleanor Roosevelt
And, finally, a quote sent to me from a dear departed friend, Dot Moore, who wrote on this piece of paper in March 2003, “You have kept the faith:”
“Never be satisfied merely with printing the news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty. ”
- Joseph Pulitzer
The journalists in France have kept the faith – and paid the price. We have freedom of the press here, but we must understand that this freedom is tenuous and can easily be taken – through terror, apathy, carelessness.
Je Suis Charlie.
