(NOTE: The following Country Editor article appeared in the March 25, 2020 issue of this newspaper by the late Publisher/Editor Sammy J. Franklin.)
Just before I left the office last Thursday afternoon, I received an email from my good friend, James Justiss, who made a very profound statement:
“If we could quarantine the television news for a couple of weeks, things may balance out in the health and economic issues that are so conflicted at this time. Just wishful thinking. Just ain’t gonna happen.”
As I drove home, I gave a great deal of thought to James’ statement. I had written my column around the Corona virus and its impact on our country, and had it ready for print this week.
Then I said to myself, “James is so right. People are just fed-up with the constant news coverage of the virus. Maybe they do need something else to read and think about.”
I thought about a column I had read a long time ago written by Lewis Grizzard, my favorite columnist until his untimely death in the early 1990’s. Grizzard started out like I did working for a small newspaper, went on to work at the Atlanta Constitution in Atlanta, GA, ending up becoming a syndicated columnist with his writings appearing in newspapers throughout the world.
The column I remember was titled, “Mebbe the front porch should come back”. I looked through one of his books and in the one titled “Chili Dawgs Always Bark At Night”, I found the article I was thinking of and I’d like to share it with my readers in order to take their mind off the current crisis. It was written in the late 1980’s.
Lewis wrote:
“I was driving through the outskirts of the city the other day and I saw a man sitting on a front porch.
It was an older house and he was an older man. Modern houses don’t have front porches anymore, and even if they did, younger men have far too much to do to sit on them.
I’m not certain when the front porch all but disappeared from American life, but it probably was about the same time television and air-conditioning were being installed in most every home.
Why sit out on the porch where it’s hot and you can get mosquito-bit when you can sit inside where it’s comfort-cooled and watch “Ozzie and Harriet?”
Even if an architect designs a porch today, it’s usually placed in the back of the house where the hot tub is.
If we do venture out of our houses today, it’s usually to get in the hot tub.
If Americans continue to spend all that time in their hot tub, we may all eventually shrink down like the Lilliputians and become prune like from boiling ourselves one too many times.
I grew up in my grandparents’ home. They had a front porch, and we spent a lot of time sitting on it.
My grandmother would shell butter beans. My grandfather would listen for trains.
“There comes the mail train from Montgomery,” he’d say, pulling his watch out of his watch pocket. “She’s running four minutes late.”
I learned a lot sitting on the front porch with my grandparents. How to shell butter beans. How to find the Big Dipper. How to wait for a mosquito to alight and then slap that sucker dead. What a pleasure it is to listen to trains.
Our neighbors often dropped by and sat on the porch with us.
“It was awful what happened to Norvell Tenny, wasn’t it?”, a neighbor would say.
“What happened to him?” my grandmother would ask, looking up from her butter beans.
“Got three fingers cut clean off down at the sawmill.”
Something else I learned on the front porch – not to include sawmilling in my future.
But even my grandparents eventually moved inside. They bought a television and enclosed the front porch and made it a den.
My grandfather enjoyed westerns. My grandmother never missed a Billy Graham sermon or a televised wrestling match. The main train to Montgomery had to get along by itself after that.
Perhaps if front porches come back and people started sitting on them again, we’d learn to relax more and talk to one another more, and being bitten by a mosquito would at least be some contact with nature.
I probably should have stopped and talked with the old man on the porch and gotten his opinions on all of this. I would have, too, but I was late for my tee time.”
Now, back to today. With most of us confined to our homes along with our spouses, children and dogs, it would be good if we had a front porch to enjoy in the afternoon, just to get out of the house. Donald Trump’s recent rallies. The only time the media reports on Trump is when they want to criticize something he has said. There is no coverage of his entire speech so that viewers can listen and make their own judgments.
However, on GETTR, President Trump’s freedom of expression is embraced, and his audience responds enthusiastically. During his January 15 rally in Arizona, nearly one million people tuned in to watch Trump’s remarks, which were livestreamed on several different GETTR accounts. This is yet another prime example of GETTR serving as the marketplace of ideas.
GETTR refuses to be ensnared by the trap that so many of our other competitors have fallen into: labeling an opinion as “misinformation” and banning users for expressing it, only for that opinion to wind up being true. We do not censor our users’ opinions. The only thing we firmly enforce is everyone’s right to free speech and access to opposing points of view.
Unfortunately, other social media platforms and the mainstream media can’t say the same. escalated by the fact that pressure is put on them early in high school to make life decisions such as college, career paths, and life after graduation in general.
7. Bullying/Cyberbullying: Bullying is no longer limited to schoolyard scuffles. Now, contemporary teenagers are worried about bullying in the real world and online. A 2018 Pew Research study found that 59 percent of US teens have been bullied or harassed online. Cyberbullying has become a growing problem due to the rise of social media.
8. Lost Identity: Teenagers are generally in a hurry to grow up and typically, this period in their lives is a struggle as they search to really “find” themselves and their identity. While many of our personality traits don’t fully evolve until later as adults, many teens are torn between knowing who they want to be and finding who they really are. With social media molding their minds, they now struggle with exploring identities that include sexuality and even gender identity, things their parents and grandparents cannot even comprehend.
9. Safety: With an increase in bullying, assaults, school shootings, and other violent acts perpetrated across the US in recent years, teenagers are afraid for their safety. Social media highlights the violent attacks at schools and adds to their fears.
10. Embarrassment: If there’s one fear that teens can agree on, it’s being embarrassed in front of their peers. Teens hurl dreaded ridicule from the lunchrooms to the chatrooms and anyone unlucky enough to do something embarrassing in the digital age will be doomed to relive their embarrassment online for all eternity.
The best way to help a teenager deal with their fears? Engage them in conversation with real answers to help them overcome those fears. Now more than ever we need parents to be parents and become a greater influence in their lives than social media.