An Eye on the Times: what can we learn from our local paper?
More than one person has said that if you really want to understand America today you need to take a good, long look at a local newspaper, assuming you are lucky enough to live in a town where you can find one. Around here, we are lucky. Tuesdays through Saturdays the Gettysburg Times turns up in the box at the end of my driveway. I can also check out the Gettysburg Connection online, and I do, almost every day.
The Connection is relatively new. The Times has been around for quite a while. I have been reading it since about 1957 or so. My dad, who was the main photographer in town back then, knew the editor well. At some point in my childhood, though I can’t remember why, I was made an honorary reporter and given a certificate and a silver dollar, both of which I still have. Often, I got to run photographs over to the newsroom on Carlisle Street. Several times I was allowed to go back and watch the pressmen set lead type and smell the ink when the—to me—gigantic press started up.
The Times today really does seem to offer a window into both the past and present. These days dropping in on a typical day you can quickly page through the contradictions of small town life: people helping people, clubs and churches making a difference, township and schoolboard meetings, deaths and obituaries, motorcycle wrecks, a truck overturned and spilling its cargo, the stuff of rural life— and every now and then, way too often actually, a truly shocking account of child abuse and/or family dysfunction ending in violence.
The editorial page, however, tells a different story. There the whole melodrama of our divided America is on display. Thanks to the Times’ willingness to publish a variety of views, a reader can enjoy a deep taste of both red and blue “thinking” in America.
Rather than generalize about the editorial page or the paper as a whole, maybe it’s best to drop into a particular day and take a look. How about Tuesday, November 15?
On the front page a young boy shakes hands with a real live veteran of WW II. To the left, two additional police officers join the Gettysburg Area School District. At the upper left, we learn that a “White Cis-men” event at Gettysburg College is a “no-go.” Below the fold we have some Secret Santa activities, a holiday gift show, and a detailed account of a meeting of nearby Cumberland Township’s Planning Commission with officials of the Gettysburg Municipal Authority (GMA) on development and water issues in the township.
The cancellation of the “cis men event” really is irresistible. A student in the Peace and Justice program had planned and advertised a gathering, as a senior project in the major, that invited people “who are tired of white cis men” to “come write and paint about it.” Cis men, in case you haven’t heard, are men who’ve decided to stick with the gender they were assigned at birth. Talk about red meat for the MAGA trolls! Maybe woke-ism is a thing, after all.
The water and development piece provides a solid set of notes from the meeting compiled by the Times’ publisher Harry Hartman. The main subject that evening was a new well along Sachs Road in Cumberland Township that will generate, if approved, 450 gallons per minute for Cumberland and the Gettysburg borough. The notes are detailed and helpful, but an important question was off the table in the meeting and is missing from the notes: Can our water table really sustain another well pumping 450 gallons per minute? Long term? Without an impact on other wells? After all, there are an awful lot of minutes in any given year. A little unnerving if we take time to do the math.
Turning to the editorial page for the 15th, we see red and blue columnists side by side reflecting on the recent election. Mark Berg, “proud liberal” and Adams County resident, addresses the question of “What we learned in last week’s election.” He quotes a lot of Republicans from the period running up to November 8 as they anticipated a “red tsunami” that, of course, didn’t happen. His conclusion: authoritarian, election-denying, Trump-endorsed candidates tended not to win. No heavy lifting, or heavy breathing, here. Just the facts and a somewhat whimsical reflection at the end on whether we now have three parties: Democrats, Republicans and “Still-Trumpers.”
Christine Flowers, “an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times,” is focused on “The real reason Fetterman defeated Dr. Oz.” The article wanders a bit as Christine absorbs “the shock” of the election defeat for Republicans, but she eventually acknowledges the importance of the abortion issue to the outcome. Reflecting on the recent Supreme Court decision on abortion, she says, “Many women across the state… were convinced that we had lost our rights.”
But the “real reason” for Fetterman’s victory is saved for the last few paragraphs of the article. “There was nothing noteworthy, commendable, or even redemptive about him,” she writes. What he “harnessed” was the “hatred and the resentment” of Donald Trump that Democrats have “harbored” since his election in 2016. This hatred, she claims, “has festered, has corrupted the innards of every progressive and even every center-left liberal for a very long time.”
As an uneasy, not always all that proud, “center-left liberal” and small-town Lutheran, I am shocked to learn that my life—and my vote for John Fetterman—is/was based on hating Donald Trump. Now, it is true that after observing him in public life for more than a decade I have concluded that Trump is a malignant narcissist and pathological liar, and a danger to our democracy and our country. As a voter I am, like many, looking for problem solvers, not problem makers, and Trump for me has been the Problem-Maker-in-Chief, dividing our country and blocking action on critically important issues like disruptive climate change, rising healthcare costs, and a real “living wage” for anybody willing to put in an old fashioned 40-hour week.
But hate Donald Trump? No way. I like my “innards” uncorrupted, thanks!