/* */ September 2025 – Vine Maple Farm

Month: September 2025

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The News– Continued

I participated in building the computer network we all know today and almost everyone but me calls the Internet, with or without the initial capital. However, my opinion forming habits are from the late twentieth century, which means I grew up intellectually on newspapers, periodicals, broadcasts, libraries, and classes, not computer networks. Those habits linger, but the first source of information and opinion for most people now, even septuagenarian cave dwellers such as myself, has become the computer network.

Fifty years ago, I ordered books from Blackwell’s of Oxford and was happy to get the books in a month. Today, I am upset when a computer takes more than two seconds to respond. This accelerated information cadence has changed the way everyone thinks.

The old way was question-search-ponder-respond. New question. Today it is question-response-new question-new response-new question-new-response… No more forced pondering while waiting for a response, which could take months.

Unfortunately for us today, the pondering step is the most difficult and creative step. And the most valuable because pondering accesses inner resources, not inflow from the outside. Pondering comes from us, not others. Consequently, public discourse is easier and more voluminous than ever before, but the fire of its humanity is dampened. Thoughtless blurts retweeted ad nauseum wash in tidal waves through the forum.

Today, the assassination of Charlie Kirk is pounding back and forth in the echo chamber. Any assassination is deplorable. The end of the life of a popular, eloquent and forceful personality attracts immediate and intense attention, but, today, little pondering.

The U.S. has seen many assassinations: Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Martin Luther King come to mind.

How Kirk’s death will be judged by future generations is unknowable, but current technology means the public has read about his death more, but pondered it less, today than any of these previous deaths in the short weeks after their occurrence.

Socrates was executed 2500 years ago for corrupting the youth of Athens. The justice of his death and its effect on public discourse is still discussed in classrooms. How will Charlie Kirk’s effect on the youth of today be discussed even ten years from now?

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Reading The News

This morning while scanning the list of web sites in my browser bookmark tab labelled “News.” I may have been doom-scrolling, but I soon lost interest in today’s events and opinions and began to think about what “News” was like when I was growing up on Waschke Road in the region that the denizens occasionally call “The Fourth Corner,” referring, perhaps pretentiously, to the last corner of the U.S. to be dominated by Europeans.

First, we lived in the upstairs of my grandparents’ house. When I entered the first grade, my grandparents bought the house and five acres across the road and they moved there, leaving old farmhouse to my parents.

My grandparents subscribed to the local daily newspaper, The Bellingham Herald. The Herald arrived by mail the day after it was published. No home delivery on Waschke Road back then. When my grandparents finished reading the paper, they gave it to my parents, usually just before supper at five-thirty. Thus, we read the evening newspaper about twenty-four hours after it was published.

We got a TV when I was in the first grade, but we didn’t watch the evening news much because Dad switched off the television when the news started. That was the signal to go to the barn and milk the cows, taking all our attention until eight or eight-thirty. That schedule was fixed by the sun and the cows. Bovines must be milked every twelve hours or they stop lactating. Milking had to be at six in the evening and six in the morning, or the dairy interfered with raising summer field crops.

Sometimes, we turned on the radio at noon dinner break, but more pressing farm issues often dominated the midday.

Knowledge from off our road also came from magazines: The Saturday Evening Post, Washington Farmer, Farm Journal, McCall’s, Sunset Magazine, Time, U.S. News and World Report, and Saturday Review all graced our rural mailbox  at one time or another.

No dearth of content threatened the old farmhouse, but the cadence of our news sources was far different from my sources today. Our most constant news source, the daily newspaper, had a twenty-four hour delay built in. Everything else was either weekly or monthly.

Compare that to today. I have close to twenty websites listed in my news bookmark tab. I could easily add more. These are all updated continuously and I open them several times a day. I have almost instant news from all over the globe.

Am I better informed than I was in the 1950s and 1960s? Depends on what you mean by “better.” I certainly wallow in half-baked and ill-considered data, but am I more aware of what is important in my surroundings?

I don’t know.