Put the End-of-Times on hold
Over the years, most of my readers on Medium, Quora, and my blogs have been patient with me when I tear off on a rant about the coming End Times or somesuch Cassandra-esque prophesy. My dour visions — unlike those of the fickle (just ask Apollo) Cassandra’s accurate but ignored warnings — rarely, if ever turn out to be quite as dramatic, or unerringly certain as those of King Priam’s daughter. I add only this caveat: so far my predictions for hard times ahead have not had enough time to play out, so maybe down the road someone crawling out of the rubble of society will say, ‘Gee, I guess the Moore guy had it right all along.”
Be that as it may (or may not), I want to hit the pause button on doomsaying to assure my friends and colleagues with whom I’ve had more than 50 years of news and government associations that i think the world of all y’all. If the public at large — not the stove-piped, bifurcated, at-each-other-throats versions of the public too easily taken as the only public worthy of 3-minutes of news shows, or 15-second soundbites — had a chance to see the work of everyday journalists and federal employees, they would be just as impressed as I was when I worked among those men and women whose news beats and government assignments reinforced the fabric of our society.
Clearing up a few misconceptions, and a different kind of thankfulness
A dear friend of mine and I had a back-and-forth email conversation a few weeks ago. He has been like a brother to me for the past 10 years or so, and in our dialogue, I had an opportunity to clear up some misconceptions he’d harbored about my life’s work. He had long been under the impression that I merited the several positions I had when I was in government and in journalism. What follows is a summary of my reply.
Most of my life’s successes have been totally unearned, coming instead from the happenstance of being in the right place at the right time when a phone call from a friend or colleague resulted in a job. Such luck is rare, but not unknown in the journalism of my day, or in the Washington mazes in which I once worked. When I look back at all the men and women who had to prove themselves everyday, under the supervision of people who had no brains at all and who regularly made life miserable for my colleagues, I…
