Spring snow anyone

 

 

03-20-09

 

Leave it to Mother Nature to bring snow on the first day of spring.

While the stuff won’t stick except to the grass, seeing it out the kitchen window first thing in the morning alarmed me.

Not exactly unbearable, this winter left me with a nagging I won’t shake until warmth settles into my bones again.

During one terrible ice storm, Sharon and I both fell at the same spot on North Street, at a driveway owned by a local low level mafia guy, who never clears his walk, and sometimes parks his Cadillac Seville across the walkway so even in summer, you are forced to walk in the street.

Spring comes this year none too soon.

We need more than sun to work out the chill in our bones.

The economic climate sends blizzards of bad news each morning when I wake up and the chill of each report clings to me all day.

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Ron Leir is leaving the Jersey Journal – forced out by an unsympathetic management.

Leave, they told him and other senior staff, or the paper closes.

This is NAFTA on a local level, shifting jobs in order to bolster the bottom line and to make up for the mismanagement of people at the top.

Each time working people make too much money, wealthy people find a way to steal it back.

After World War II, returning veterans began to show real progress in the American work place so that by the 1970s they earned a moderately good wage.

Out went the jobs to some other country, where slavery hadn’t been abolished and unions hadn’t fought to good fight to keep shareholder boards in check.

Land values, fortunately, remained stable so that for the most part – with the exception of 1987 – property values rose so that working families continued to advance.

This latest plot seemed determined to drive the poor and working class out of the real estate market, keeping them hungry enough to slave away at petty jobs.

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Leir’s firing stuns me partly because he has worked at the same place for almost 40 years, starting as a summer intern at the Journal in 1970, and then as a full time reporter in 1972.

And I thought my 20 years in the business was an accomplishment!

The sadness of his leaving is partly a reflection of the change of culture as newspapers finally die off after decades in the death pangs.

Radio and TV were supposed to be our demise, and still we hung on.

But it isn’t even the Internet or change of technology that spells our end, but rather some more significant revolution that we ourselves are responsible for. We no longer serve the same role as we once did, muckrakers seeking to uncover the ills of society. We have become purveyors of the perverse, as the headline to Liz Smith’s column portrayed this morning: Liz Smith had scoop on Richardson’s tragic death.

We need to take credit for being vultures?

Readers can get that trash on any TV channel, and told better.

In some ways, the death of the newspaper also spells the end of civilization as we know it, returning us to those days when rumor mongering served as the prominent means of learning news.