Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal is one of our finest contemporary commentators. The former Ronald Reagan staffer is conservative but not blinded by partisanship, and she sees key things other miss, as evidenced by her 2017 Pulitzer Prize.
Of all the responses to the terrible Florida school shooting, Noonan had the most thoughtful. She asked why these things keep happening in America and answered it this way:
“We know. We all say it privately, but it’s so obvious it’s hardly worth saying. We have been swept by social, technological and cultural revolution. The family blew up — divorce, unwed childbearing. Fatherless sons. Fatherless daughters, too. Poor children with no one to love them. The internet flourished. Porn proliferated. Drugs, legal and illegal. Violent video games, in which nameless people are eliminated and spattered all over the screen. ... The abortion regime settled in, with its fierce, endless yet somehow casual talk about the right to end a life. An increasingly violent entertainment culture — low, hypersexualized, full of anomie and weirdness, allergic to meaning and depth,” she wrote.
Many liberals seem to completely miss that those things are even problems. In fact, such as with abortion and drugs , they often celebrate them.
The phrase “Make America Great Again” launched Donald Trump to the presidency because he was willing, despite his many awful characteristics and shallow solutions, to at least talk about these problems that Noonan poetically stated here.
I often get down thinking about these hurdles and wonder if we’re all living in the declining years of this country. Trying to successfully manage a newspaper during this time of upheaval particularly gives one insights into these struggles.
Facing that reality, we all need something from time to time to pull us back from the precipice of despair and remind us that although we can’t fix the big problems facing America, we need to keep doing what we can in our sphere of influence to make things better. Two things did that for me in the past week.
First, a group of fifth graders from Columbia Elementary School visited our office. They put together the “Paw Printz” page in our paper, where they interview fellow students and teachers about things going on in their school and write about it. It’s really remarkable to me how well they do and an encouragement that a future generation will know and appreciate what newspapers do.
Our staff here put together activities for them to do designing ads, taking pictures with the professional camera in our studio and racing to see who could insert sales circulars into papers the fastest. We tried to make it fun for them, and I think our staff enjoyed it just as much. I know I did.
Second, I attended the ribbon cutting Friday for Jan Marie’s Upscale Flea Market on Main Street. I jotted down a few notes as it struck me that having an 8,000-square-foot facility across from the courthouse occupied is a good thing for our community.
“It’s wonderful to see this historic building brought to life, especially downtown,” Carolyn Burton of the Marion County Development Partnership said.
She thanked owners Janet and Jamie Breakfield, as did Mayor Justin McKenzie. The mayor also shared the story of how they relocated there, where the Breakfields mentioned to him that they wanted to expand and how he put them in touch with property owner Mickey Webb.
Janet Breakfield said people warned them not to go downtown, though. “There’s enough traffic,” they would tell her. “It’s dead.”
“I am happy to say they were wrong,” Breakfield said to applause Friday in front of her store.
And that gives me hope that those of us who sense America itself might also be dying are wrong, that it really can overcome its moral failings and become great again, if only good people will try.
Charlie Smith is editor and publisher of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him at csmith @columbianprogress.com.
