A new column and a new conversation too

I started writing before

I could write. On Saturdays, I would cajole fellow first graders to my living room, where they sat cross-legged as I narrated my weekly crayon-picture newspaper of record.

Readership took a hit in summer. Even Louisiana’s hottest days could charm an editor and her captive readers outside.

But once I finally learned how to write, I found no good reason to stop. Once I got to Palm Beach County, I found no reason to leave. If Southeast Florida is the candy store of American journalism, Palm Beach County is nestled somewhere between the Atomic Fireballs and green M&Ms.

It took me all of three days working as a reporter in Palm Beach County before I knew we were a match. I was sitting in the newsroom. Someone was chatting up Dachshund liposuction. An editor stood up, all waving arms and frantic, yelling at no one in particular, “Does anyone know where Tarzan’s tiger is?” (Scaling a 12-foot fence, as it turned out.)

AndIthought:Thisis home.

It was just this side of gospel in that newsroom. Everything odd eventually comes to Palm Beach County.

There’s also a hidden county, where a night-time knock on a local prison door went unanswered; opioid-dispensing doctors casually meted out death; giant half-eaten fruits lurk just off Worth Avenue; the sheriff has had more power than you might think; and far too many people get off a plane at PBIA with a suitcase and a scam.

Its economic inequality will break your heart. In Palm Beach County, a single mother of two working for the median retail wage will spend hours every day cashiering out $37 blouses she will never be able to buy. Not for herself. Not for her children.

Living just this side of the poverty line, she will be lucky to squeeze her family into a one-bedroom and even then, at the edge of some of the most beautiful oceanfront in America, she might not be able to take her children to the beach: A one day pass to Boca Raton’s Red Reef Park costs $35.

How could she not vote for revolution? Certain one-percenters living just across the Intracoastal from our single mom have been only too happy to oblige.

There’s another Palm Beach County, too, the one that seemed to grow up around me when I wasn’t looking. To the right of my home, in a small community where we know the names of each other’s pets, one of my favorite neighbors briefly ran up a QAnon flag. To the right, a kind man is an election denier. Across the way, a family flew a Confederate flag sometime around the release of the Access Hollywood tape.

Which is why this December, I wondered whether it would be prudent to put a menorah in the window. Probably not, I decided.

Instead, I fired up five, lights a-blazing, and now we all know each other a little better. So far so good.

The truth may be the most dangerous thing in the world. At the very least, it will get you uninvited to all the best parties. But whether with candles or in a column, especially now, it’s more dangerous to be silent than it is to tell our truths.

I am sometimes asked if I think local news will survive. It has to. There is no other way to know the truth of your own world.

Twitter isn’t a public square; it’s a shouting match. Facebook still has blood on its hands from its role in Myanmar’s 2018 ethnic cleansing of Rohingya. Bloggers can’t be everywhere. Pop-up news sites secretly funded or operated by special interests exist so they can pull the wool over your eyes.

I may infuriate you. I may amuse you. But if this column becomes a one-way street — I talk, you absorb as quietly as my first young, largely indifferent readers once did — I will have failed you. An opinion column is a jumping-off point to local dialogue, and local democracy can’t survive without either the dialogue or the journalism that delivers it.

So. Let me know who you are; what you think.

And let’s talk.