I Changed My Hairstyle So Many Times Now

As a child, I learned literacy was a fundamental tool of a democratic society. All you had, when I was a kid, was a choice between literate and illiterate; those who could read and those who couldn't. 

It's taken us until the 21st century and the Age of Connectivity as the world gets joined more closely and tightly together to add a category that has sadly (to me) become the fastest-growing, alliterate; people who know how to read but choose not to.

When I was a kid every living room had a television, usually with the Big Three channels, a public TV station and some kind of local low-power operation; a telephone on the wall in the kitchen with the really long cord so Mom could consult with Dad, who was in the living room, while she was calendar-planning with someone on the phone; and a daily newspaper, in my case living in Franklin Township (in Somerset County in New Jersey), an afternoon paper, the Daily Home News (now the Home News Tribune), delivered to the front stoop. I used to help Bob F deliver the paper on my bike, and he on his.

Local newspapers are in rough shape that's getting rougher.  Subscribers are diminishing and that means the advertisers are growing scarce as online micro-journals start to dominate the etherscape in which so many of us spend so much of our time. 

Instead of all the technology and information making us smarter, we've become more insular and more distrustful and intolerant of viewpoints that are not our own. I'm as guilty as the next person even as I finger-point at them ignoring the fingers of the hand pointing back at myself (that's why I  usually wear mittens). 

An hour on social media on any given day right now can age you ten-fold as you wade through invective and innuendo all masquerading as information, from any and all sides of the aisle. And as McKay Coppins points out in The Atlantic, cheer up things could get worse between now and the November elections and in all likelihood will.   

It's getting hard to remember, much less concede, that there are three sides to every story: Mine, Yours, and The Truth.
-bill kenny