We give thanks for those who seek news
Something about standing on a mountaintop in the dark, under the stars, provides a profound perspective on our place in the world.
I have made that trip once a year for the past 40 years and find that it helps keep me centered and focused — like weekly trips to church but closer to heaven, or at least the heavens.
I can’t say that these annual trips to the Allegheny Mountains with my friend Dan have always had such a profound effect. When we were 17, it was more about getting away from schoolwork and parental control. I’m sure we solved a few of the world’s problems standing at the porch railing gazing upon a galaxy of stars, but we were generally more concerned about our dream car or next motorcycle.
Forty years later, a cabin off the grid in the mountain woods is a place to get away from the office computer, TVs and cellphones. But it’s more a place for recentering and refocusing our lives.
The most recent trip to the mountains came last weekend, the latest-ever in the year for the annual trip, which put us there at the start of Thanksgiving week.
Thanksgiving will be over by the time you read this, but part of my mountaintop reassessment of priorities this year includes telling you how thankful I am for you.
I’m thankful for Dispatch readers because you care enough about your community and your place in it to keep up with the news about what’s happening around you. You are engaged and concerned. You have thoughts to share, and what we deliver to you in words, photos, graphics, audio and video helps you inspire or drive conversations.
You don’t always like or agree with what we write, and some of you tell us so. I respect and appreciate that.
Part of a healthy relationship and conversation is being able to tell someone that you disagree and why — without making it a personal attack.
These are the informed conversations that have gone on in communities across the United States for two and a half centuries, the talk that leads to action — righting wrongs and improving the quality of life.
I’m also thankful for and blessed to work with a team of talented journalists who dedicate their lives to bringing you the news. This team includes not only The Dispatch staff but also journalists in eight other Ohio communities where GateHouse Media owns newspapers.
I met recently with our colleagues in Ashland and Wooster, in part to thank them for their dedication to the craft. They are doing God’s work, in my view, seeking out facts and delivering them to readers in compelling stories and images.
Never have journalists been more needed in this country and less appreciated. But most journalists I know have thick skin and look at their work not as a job but as a calling. We do it because we know that it’s important for you to have facts to help discern truth.
We are grateful for a country — a country that is great and always has been — that provides us, and you, the freedom of speech that allows us to freely examine and discuss the important issues we all face.
President Abraham Lincoln put it this way on Oct. 3, 1863, when he declared by proclamation a day of Thanksgiving:
“The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added which are of so extraordinary a nature that they can not fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchful providence of Almighty God. ...
“I do therefore invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.
“And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union.”