Editorial
When you write several thousand words a week, 52 weeks per year, it’s easy to lose track of what was written last month, let alone last year. It all gets compressed under the tonnage of thinly sliced ribbons of trees, each dripping with interview notes, cutlines, halfdrafted ideas, and the remnants of words from the cutting room floor, all squished into some kind of postthesaurusical ooze that might be extracted and refined at some future date.
However, out of each of the hundreds of articles contained within the pages of each of the 52 editions the Chronicle publishes each year, the Veterans Day edition is one of my favorites. The only real contender otherwise is the Thanksgiving Edition.
The irony here is that of the 52 weekly and two special editions, Thanksgiving and Veterans Day weeks are the only ones that are almost guaranteed to be completely void of the information from the standard news cycle.
What would make the editor of a newspaper — especially one that likes to stir up trouble as much as I do — get the most enjoyment from being part of a newspaper that doesn’t write any news?
It’s because the focus of the Thanksgiving Edition is sharing pictures of people in our communities and what they have to be thankful for, and the Veterans Day issue is full of stories of the men and women that make the uniquely American Thanksgiving Day list is as long as it is.
These are the two most refreshing weeks for me as a journalist, as there are few things that will excite you and simultaneously depress you faster than an updated news cycle. But when I spend three days with a camera around my neck hearing what people are thankful for or hearing how a time of service changed the future of an individual and their country, it helps to keep me motivated for the remaining 50 weeks.
The only tragedy is that as editor I’m forced to, well, edit. As a result, you often only read a fragment of the stories I get the honor of sharing about our veterans each year.
Unlike a politician whose 45-minute speech can be captured in a two-sentence summary, a veteran speaks for 15 seconds and shares more than a 1,000 photographs.
For that matter, they convey more truth than 1,000 editorials, which is why I’m keeping this one brief.
Read, and more importantly, reflect on the stories in this week’s edition.
There will be plenty of time to get back to the news cycle next week, and with the recent election results and top-of-the-month government meetings, there will be no shortage of things to read about.
As for this week, however, with Election Day behind us and Thanksgiving Day just around the corner, Veterans Day is perfectly sandwiched. You just had an opportunity to cast your vote in a Democratic society, so in my editorial opinion, if you need something to be thankful for this November, you can be thankful for a vet.