ISawArkansas

There’s a big national hoopla right now about our man who done us wrong. He was president of our country only once but wouldn’t believe it. He egged on people looking for something to do together that involved camo clothing, pepper spray, baseball bats and shouting. It was on live TV.

I missed the news on January 6, 2021, because I was riding shotgun in the rain listening to Taj Mahal’s Phantom Blues and trying to figure out the difference between Oklahoma and Texas without looking at the signs. I was looking for a good used car. When I first heard anything about the Capitol storming, it had been over for hours and I was in Nocona.

It took time to think too hard about that day. Had I seen it on live TV I would’ve been Velcroed to a chair,experiencing emotional moonshine in itty bitty doses.

That’s when I decided that it might not be good for me to watch any news, so I quit.

Since that event 1000 days ago today, I’ve had three birthdays and put 18,000 miles on my used car. One million Americans have died of Covid, 17 million acres of U.S. land have been burned by wildfires, and the Supreme Court has dismantled a decision made in 1973 about women and their health, deciding to put it into the hands of legislators and other strangers. Ukraine was a breadbasket, not a crater.

Does anyone know why we still insist on saying “gun control” instead of “gun responsibility?” Land sakes, no one wants to be controlled. But opposite sides of an issue, one refusing to budge and the other refusing to enforce the law of common sense, ends in a tie game. How much more must we endure? Forever?

That brings me back to not watching the news. It’s weird and true. Reading news, though, is different.

“Community journalism has long been a part of the lifeblood of America, but never have the stakes been so high for the people creating it.” That quotation is from the cover of Beacons in the Darkness, a 14-chapter book researched and written by award-winning former Chicago Sun–Times columnist Dave Hoekstra.

Dave walked into our office one afternoon before all the wildfires, viruses, insurrections, shallow government decisions and wars of the past 1000 days. He plopped down in the rocking chair and said, “So. Why do you do this?”

He talked to Perlinda, Jeremiah, and me for hours. He had done the same at small newspapers across the country, wanting to find out if there was anyone left after for-profit journalism took the pop, pop, fizz, fizz out of local newspapers.

We told Dave that people tell us they want quiet time and two cups of coffee to read our paper every week. They clip stories out and put them on their refrigerator. They like having their club, their council, and their dead being acknowledged. They want to turn pages with their thumb and fingers, not their keyboard.

We agree. We want the same thing. We’re here because it’s work, not a job. We’re here because we’re inspired by you, Eureka Springs, because you’re alive. We’re here because of you, readers, because you’re real. We’re here because we want to answer our own phone and deal with neighbors instead of stockholders. We’re all about the Senator John Fetterman dress code and we’re blissed out delivering our own newspapers every week.

We need help. We need checkbook help. You’re the only ones we can ask. We’ve been in business for 4,107 days and won’t make seven more without serious help.

That’s all I can write right now.