An Empty Field

 

A friend of mine posted a video on facebook recently which  meant a lot to me. So, thanks a lot.

I’ll share it with you -  not the video, which most people would find a little boring, even though it only lasts a couple of minutes  - but what it means.

What you see is a camera panning across an empty field. A big empty field in a commercial/industrial area, one that has obviously been leveled by bulldozers to prepare for some new construction.

There’s no sign of what was there before. No sign of the big white 414,000 square foot building with the big NEWSDAY sign proudly announcing the home of suburban journalism in America.

No presses. No classified advertising department. No cafeteria. No circulation trucks. No newsroom. Just a big open field.

Of course, it won’t be empty for long. A new $190 million dollar construction project is going up. It won’t be as grand as the old Newsday building, just two warehouses totaling 945,000 square feet.

Hartz Mountain paid $54 million to buy the old Newsday property, but the Suffolk Industrial Development Authority gave the company $16.8 million in tax breaks, to help meet what it called a “very healthy demand for warehousing and distribution space…”

What went unsaid is that there was no longer a very healthy demand for a very good local newspaper, a daily that had the resources to cover towns and villages, counties and state and federal governments. Over the years, there were investigations  of businesses and utilities, scandals to expose, corruption to unearth.

In the china cabinet in my dining room, there is a small plexiglass plaque showing that my old paper won a Pulitzer Prize for covering a really big plane crash. It was really an editor’s story, although me and a lot of other reporters worked on and off for months trying to find out everything about the crash and its impact. A couple of reporters spent a year or more on it.

Eventually, the crash changed the way airlines handle fuel vapors in near-empty tanks. Probably saved hundreds of lives around the world - maybe more.

But, that was old-school journalism, a time when people actually had to wait a whole day to find out what was news. Now we have on-line web feeds, news from Facebook, competing with all those cute pictures. And floods of opinions from no one knows where.

I live in an aging part of New York State, where most people think they are computer literate and also say they won’t take a Covid vaccine until they do more research. I will never get to ask them which genetic sequences they are looking into, or how to explain just what efficacy means. Or even how control groups are monitored. Not even how to get that data on their tablet or their facebook account.

No, there is no room for that stuff any more. No room for a newspaper that offered much of it to hundreds of thousands of readers every day.

Just a big empty field. Makes me glad I retired.

I got my shots

 I got my second shot of the Coronavirus vaccine a week ago, and my wife got hers today.

I don’t mean to brag. That’s not the point. But, there is no other way to say it - I haven’t been this relaxed in the past year.

Now I qualified for the vaccine for several reasons, and so did a lot of other people - about one out of every five people in the United States so far, according to published figures.

I can’t speak for all of us, but I would be willing to bet that we are all sharing the same happy thoughts about going out to eat with some friends in the summer, going to a concert or a show in the fall, and hoping the somewhere along the way there will be time to go to a baseball game.

Not necessarily a major league team, but at least a local one.  The Long Island Ducks - an Atlantic League team - lost their entire season last year, but are supposed to play before a crowd at the end of May. Go Ducks!

It’s amazing how many things you can look forward to, from going to the local store to buy some milk or lettuce to wandering up and down the aisles of a nursery to buy some plants.

And best of all, not only can we go out, but we don’t have to worry about getting infected with a disease that can kill or, if not fatal, leave someone with a debilitating disease that will cast a pall over the rest of their lives. And, of course, not unknowingly giving that disease to others.

Heck, there are wineries within a hour’s drive of my house that might be open again, or games to be played with friends, And no dark cloud of worry to hover over the table when you pick up a card or roll the dice.

Of course, I realize that a lot of other people have gotten their vaccinations as well as me and my wife, and a lot more are waiting for their chance. But it seems   tens of thousands of otherwise educated people are deciding not to line up for it - at least it is proven absolutely, completely safe to their satisfaction.

Strangely, they don’t tell you what will satisfy them. Some hint that if a few thousand more people - or a few million more people - get vaccinated first, they would consider it.

I’ve seen a lot of interviews where those anti-vaxxers say it is safer not to take the vaccine than to take it. They promise to keep an eye on the situation by looking at e-mails from their friends, who certainly have the time to check out messages from their on-line friends who are passing it along.

Shame on them. Shame on their friends. 

Why?

Well, there are a lot of lies going around, passed on from person to person from who knows where. Some of them even look official. Heck, some are being sent out by officials.

Let me give you some examples. I won’t go into too much detail, but you can look them up yourself. Why should I have all the fun.

In no particular order: 

The test results were faked. Why? To rig the Presidential election for Democrats, to make money for their financial supporters, to support big business over the freedom-loving patriots - take your pick.

The vaccine is made from the Covid virus, and you can get the disease from it.

No and no. But, you only have doctors and scientists to explain the truth, and some people would rather believe their cell phones.

The vaccine will alter your DNA. Just ask anyone who tells you that what DNA is. If they can’t explain it, don’t believe them.

The vaccine was made from a cell line that came from an aborted fetus. Now that’s not true, and some pretty impressive people have tried to kill that rumor. Don’t take my word for it. Just ask the Pope.

“Who believes this stuff?” you might ask. Well, a recent NPR/PBS Newshour poll fibbed that nearly half the people who voted for Trump do not plan to take the vaccine. That resistance may affect when the country can go back to normal.

It’s not clear how many of them know - or believe - that Trump took the vaccine in the White House when no cameras were on him. Or even care about it.

And I will ask one final question. Just what do the people who keep saying the vaccine is a fraud, or dangerous or even deadly get from digging their heels in and condemning it and all that a vaccine stands for?

 So, let me put all doubts aside. I took my two shots, my wife has taken her two shots, and other close members of my family who qualify have also been vaccinated.

Which leaves me to wonder just one more thing. How come we were so lucky?

Well, for me, I got a call from my doctor, who is part of a practice at a huge state university medical center. Age and pre-existing conditions made me eligible, but it was hard to get an appointment on the state website.

The call came as a surprise. There was some vaccine available, and they had to make appointments to use it all once the containers were opened. The next day.

And, let me say, it worked like a charm. Now my family is quibbling about who is authorized and qualified to give out shots. Typical. We never leave anything alone.

But, we do check out the facts. Ever have dinner with your kids and half the people at the table are looking things up on their cell phones?

I live in an interesting house.

Americans Love Their Re-Runs

 There’s no question about it. Americans love re-runs.

We don’t normally watch re-runs when something new and entertaining comes out, and let’s not get into an argument over whether you can call something new when it’s been streaming for weeks.

I’ll go Hollywood here. It’s new when they say it is. New when it’s released in the North American markets. Just ignore the fact that you may have seen it on the web last month.

I’ll get to what I’m talking about in a minute. For now, just wrap your mind around the idea of re-runs - how comforting they are, and how you enjoy the mystery even though you’ve seen how it all ends a dozen times.

Now, before I start talking about Donald Trump, let me play around with an old phrase. It’s particularly appropriate for the party of Lincoln, because he actually said it; in 1858 at a Lincoln-Douglas debate in Clinton, Illinois. “You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

Now you get it. I was watching part of Trump’s talk at CPAC and the idea popped into my head when he told us that caravans of immigrants are already crossing the border because of President Biden.

Did he really say that? Don’t take my word for it. Listen to him - “Joe Biden has triggered a massive flood of illegal immigration into our country the likes of which we have never seen before.” Trump added that, after just a month in office, President Biden “…already increased refugee admissions by nearly 10 times. But in effect, it will soon be hundreds of times as millions of people flow up through our soon to be open borders.”

I could hear the sound of all those buses filled with potential illegal immigrants coming up the legendary and non-existent South American Expressway, going right to that small gap in Trump’s magnificent border wall - the gap created because Ultra-liberal Democratic Environmentalists didn’t want to wall off the entire 1,240 miles of the Rio Grande River between Texas and Mexico.

It was comforting, in a way. Like watching a re-run of Law and Order, or the Wizard of Oz,  or even 1776 on Independence Day. It was familiar, and entertaining, and in a way mostly comforting. That’s because I already saw the end of the show.

Oh, the long version of the show ran for years - judging by newspapers and on-line discussions, it was the most popular show in the nation. But, it ended badly on Election Day and the day after and the day after that. In fact, like a good series, it never really ended. Just cliffhanger after cliffhanger. More like a soap opera than a sitcom, not even an interesting crossover event, because the Trump Show was really the only show in town.

The comforting part was that I knew how it would all turn out. Except, in this sequel, the people in charge of guarding the Capital know that really bad things will happen to them if they don’t do their job.