Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one” - A.J. Liebling
My father Bob Wilson took this to heart, and bought one and started his own newspaper, the Prairie Post of Maroa, Illinois in 1958, and ran it until he died in 1972. It never had a circulation of more than 2500 or so, but every week, he would fire off editorials at everyone and everything from local events to the actions of the nations of the world.
He may have been a Quaker peace activist in a Republican district, but his love and support of the farming communities garnered him enough respect that he eventually ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1962, though he lost. (He might have tried again, had he not died of an accident while only 49.) Many of his views ring true today. And he might have been willing to change the ones that fell behind the times. Although raised in the casual racism of the 1920s and 1930s, at the age of 15 he took stock of what he was being taught and discarded much of it as being wrong, and lived his life with respect for all.
I decided to transcribe his old editorials (I may make a book for some of my relatives) and every once in a while I will repost one here, as a view of how the world has changed wildly, or remained stubbornly the same.
December 6, 1962
REMEMBER... ...STOP
An aggressive virtue sometimes takes on the appearance of a vice. Americans are trained from childhood in the parliamentary procedure necessary to the functioning of democratic organizations. Clubs and societies flourish at all age levels, each supplied with the full complement of officers down to sergeants-at-arms.
The jest is told that three Americans fell out of an airplane; before they reached the ground they had organized and elected a president, a secretary and a treasurer!
The process can be destructive. The creative stir in some humane breast often becomes unrecognizable when it is organized, codified, and grows top heavy with bylaws and procedure.
Whereas, we highly approve of general training in Robert's Rules of Order;
and
Whereas, we think it commendable that every American can be President – of something, but
Whereas, the art of organization has an alarming tendency to run wild and proliferate;
Therefore be it resolved that this situation demands the formation of a Society to Terminate Organizational Proliferation, the initials of which spell, “STOP”.
We hereby proclaim the formation of said Society, and declare the membership roster open for enrollment.
The first order of business, in our organization to end organizations, will of course be the election of officers.
Do we hear any nominations?
December 20, 1962
SOMETHING THAT LASTS
What we call rust in metals has its counterpart in the weathering away of wood, of leather, of any organic material left exposed to the hungry atmosphere. It dries up, cracks, enters into combination with the oxygen and is at length gone.
Time and the elements use up the human frame in much the same way. You have seen the little ones, like puppy dogs or the plump buds of trees. They flower and fill, year by year until in young manhood and womanhood they stand fully formed like sound and vigorous trees.
Almost in the moment of perfection, the changes begin. Mirrors, thank goodness, do not retain the anguish in women's eyes as they study the beginning of wrinkles, not to mention the puzzlement of the fortyish male whose trousers continue to shrink each time they are dry-cleaned.
As we grow old, how we love to hold plump little hands in our dry and brittle ones; with what pride we watch the growth of young men and women who stand tall as we once stood tall.
All of us become etched with lines, but the lines tell different stories. As wood weathers, the most durable parts stand out boldly. The face to which a scowl is native may lose much else, but the scowl is graven deep. Another is carved into the smile that has rested on that face throughout many years, in some of which smiling may not have come easy.
Choose well when you are young what will be first in your thoughts, for when you have grown old it will be written there for all to see. Shall it be resolution? Gentleness, or humor? Perhaps greed? You recall the tale of the small boy who so admired the “Great Stone Face” of a familiar mountain that time brought to him the same dauntless courage of that craggy profile.
Time is so short. Are you really so limited by what you have been, or by what someone else wants you to be? Isn't it true that you are really free to choose the essential as your goal, that which you would have if, afterward, you could rummage through it all and take what mattered? Are not goals something that possess us and change us whether we ever can reach them? Will you not be changed if you but choose, in one moment, softly and quietly as the fall of snow, to seek and therefore to be the truest, the finest and the best?
Listen at Christmas, to the sound of bells and little children's voices and the story of Christmas. Look deep, beyond the tinsel and the glitter. Pay no mind to the fairytales, for fairytales are written for children. There is something more.
When we are truly ready for Christmas, we are ready for each of our days including the last one. The slender thread of sand that streams through the hourglass is wearing and wearing at all of us. When the soft parts have been eroded away, what will stand out at the last?