Janet's Planet - "And that's the way it is ..."
Can you imagine?
No Internet. No 24-hour, non-stop, in-your-face news cycles. No blogs or tweets or bloody reinventions of the information wheel. Just a solid, calm trusted family member who delivered the world to us without all the fuss. Last Friday, the legendary CBS News anchorman Walter Cronkite died after a long illness at the age of 92. When he signed off with his famous “...and that’s the way it is,” you believed him.
You didn’t run to a portable device to plug into a world wide web of swirling information and opinions just to see if you could top Walter’s declaration. There were no tweets and peaks into Uncle Walter’s closet, where a team of “reporters” gave you the skinny on his skivvies. You simply shut off the television; digested the information and went to bed. You were not stuffed, bloated and gassy. You were nourished. That’s the way it was, at least for many of us.
Walter Cronkite’s passing gives me pause.
It also makes me homesick. For what and whom I can’t distinctly say. In my wildest imagination, I don’t pretend to know (or identify with) the so-called Glory Days of news delivery or media icons. Maybe it’s simply the midwestern delivery that sounded so much like the voices in my head growing up. Maybe it was the grandfatherly way he informed us. Or the way I felt after he told me the world was wacky, but I was still safe. Maybe I’m just an insecure, overgrown baby/publisher who wants someone older, wiser and much less dramatic than me, to say:
“There, there, little missy. Everything’s going to be just fine. The economic storm will pass. People will start spending money again. Folks in finance, whom you’ve supported and dealt with reasonably throughout the years, will not treat you like doo-doo anymore. Postal rates will hold steady. Print is certainly not dead. Advertisers will return. Readers still want their neighborhood news from a home-grown source. They’ll get the bigger picture from me. Settle down now. No need to fret. The world’s a little crazy right now. It’s just the way it is.”
Perhaps the media gods are causing a ruckus up there in Information Heaven, preparing a place for us in this silly business of communication and information delivery. It would be nice to know that someone’s watching over us as we all try to figure out how to do the next right thing. No matter what size or shape your information comes in, things are a little unsettling in this day and age. That’s just the way it is!
