CREATORS SYNDICATE

people to donate their organs after death.

For those who want to get a little closer to the pig’s carcass the commentary birds are pecking, here’s how to make yourself a reporter.

Get a newspaper job. Get a job on a newspaper run by people who actively discourage reporters from becoming celebrities.

Cover small- town or city politics. Listen to three- hour debates over the purchase of a stop sign, and where to place that stop sign.

Write the stop sign story and get a call the next day from an angry elderly woman, a lifelong resident of the town, who is incensed that you referred to the stop sign’s location as “Holmes Road,” when everyone knows it’s “Holmes Street.” Write a correction.

Carry a waterproof jacket in the backseat of your car in case you’re at an outside assignment and it starts to rain.

Learn that everyone lies sometime, but it doesn’t make you smart if you think everyone is lying all the time. They’re not.

Interview the mother or father of a murder victim within 24 hours of the killing. Reporters call this “the death knock.”

Know as many people as you can. Make sure most of them are not politicians.

At least once, get someone’s blood on you. I attended a car vs. motorcycle crash and stepped in some of the victim’s blood. “Look down,” a cop said to me as I left the scene. “You’re leaving tracks.”

Hang out with, sleep with or know at least a few people who are criminals, illiterates, ex-convicts, welfare recipients, immigrants, legal or illegal, or minimumwage workers. The poor and troubled are not social causes, nor are they leeches or scum. They’re people. You can dislike them, but you can’t refuse to learn what they have to teach.

You are not God. The editor is not God. Conservatives aren’t God, and neither are liberals. Republicans and Democrats are not God. The readers are not God.

Truth is God.

The Land of Trumpin,