Abandoning My Post

As a college graduate in the mid-eighties, I lacked seriousness and substance. My girlfriend’s father at the time called me the ‘party kid’ and ya know what, he nailed it. My knowledge of the world around me ended at my five favorite bands, which six packs I could purchase for under two bucks, and an encyclopedic knowledge of all things Tolkien. I was a blank canvass, a clean slate, an uncarved block. Endless potential, but a real fixer-upper.

I hated my job. I held a cog-in-the-wheel position at a government contracting firm creating spreadsheets with a pencil, a piece of ledger paper, and a ten key calculator. It took me all afternoon to produce what two years later I would create in a few minutes on a computer loaded with Lotus 1-2-3*. The boredom hurt my brain. I spent my whole morning counting the minutes until my lunch hour.

While most of my young-adult coworkers lunched in the cafeteria for social hour or dashed out to local fast-food restaurants, I sat in my office and read the Washington Post cover to cover. For the first time in my life, I learned all about the topics I studiously ignored in my high school history and civics classes—the American system of government, our growing national debt, foreign skirmishes and scuffles, the cold war, and so on.

I obsessively tracked the ongoing drug war in ‘the nation’s murder capital’ and got pissed off at Ann Lander’s conservative-minded problem solving for the advice column crowd. When Remar Sutton launched his twice weekly health and wellness column Fit Over 40, I hung on every word as he morphed from an overweight smoker into a fit triathlete. My own growing dedication to fitness matched Sutton’s, and forty years later, fitness is still an integral aspect of my being. If forced to name my largest life influences, I think Sutton would make the list.

By the mid-nineties, through steady readership of the Post, I’d become like every other adult in DC, liberal AF and passionate about the daily news. So much so, that when I posted a ‘personal dating ad’ in the local City Paper, one of the ways I described myself was by referencing my two favorite Washington Post Op-Ed writers.

When my wife Susan and I moved to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 2005, we hunted down the only service that offered a daily subscription to the Post. We paid way more than the thirty-five-cent cover price, knowing that a daily fix of the Post guided by its unparalleled editorial staff was worth any amount they might charge.

I can’t remember when we switched to a digital subscription, but we’ve had one for years… until this week when we cancelled our subscription along with 75,000 other readers. I’m surprised we made it that long. We should have cancelled when Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post and Amazon, ordered his editorial staff not to endorse a candidate in the recent presidential election. We should have cancelled when Bezos gave a million dollars for Trump’s inauguration and visited Mar-a-Lago to genuflect before the new king.

Earlier this week, a few hours after dining with Trump, Bezos announced a revamp of his editorial page. Instead of covering a wide range of topics, usually from a leftist point of view, Bezos announced going forward, the Op-Eds will only advocate for personal liberties and free markets—darling topics of the political right. Bezos ruined the best part of his newspaper. Many have pointed out that since it’s his paper, Bezos can do whatever he wants with it. But Christ, it’s a 148-year-old institution. Bezos is merely the current custodian, and he’s sacrificing everything it stands for to keep Trump from coming after Amazon. I read today that the Post has lost a net of 200,000 subscriptions since November.

Over the past five weeks, the sheer magnitude of disturbing, disgusting and criminal actions coming out of Washington makes my disappointment in losing my favorite newspaper seem insignificant and maybe even petty. The impact of these actions, happening day after day, are altering the world before our very eyes. We thought Covid changed everything? Watch what this crap does.

* Lotus 1-2-3 was a precursor to MS Excel and Google Sheets.

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Previously Published on jefftcann.com and is republished on Medium.

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Photo credit: Wikimedia