As we grow older in the newspaper business we notice two disturbing phenomena: 1) we are publishing more and more stories about men our age dieing and 2) we are publishing more stories about friends of our children getting in trouble with the law.
Both should have been expected. Twenty years ago it was a rare occasion when a 30 year old man died and rarer still would be a 5 year old robbing a bank.
But at 50 we are losing friends our age at a pretty regular clip, heart attack here, cancer there. It is a little disconcerting to say the least.
What really hits us hard though is not a reminder of our mortality but the trials of children old enough to be our children.
Abraham Morales played football with two of our sons and now he will probably go to prison.
We remember this boy only he is not a boy now and it is sad for us to reconcile that happy 12 year old with the jail mugshot.
It is hard for us to go through our archives and reread stories of Toni Fratto’s performance in a beauty pageant and then revisit the awful crime she committed.
It is sad but it is life and it is truth.
Every inmate in prison was once a bright shiny kindergartner.
Something went wrong.
We can blame bad parenting, bad schools, a bad society but for every convict there are thousands if not millions of people who had rougher times and who are doing just fine.
It is said that the older one gets the more conservative one becomes. But if anything time has made us more compassionate to the children of our children’s age.
Perhaps it is because with now more frequent reminders of our own mortality we grieve for those who so young throw their lives away.
The head of Exon Oil got vilified a couple of weeks ago for stating the obvious that if the climate changed we would have to adapt to it.
Not really revolutionary, human beings have been adapting to a changing climate since well before they were human beings. A species either adapts or goes extinct and for the past 200,000 years or so we have been pretty good at adapting.
The thing that bothers us in the debate is not whether climate change is happening but rather is it all that bad.
While temps above 100 are uncomfortable a warmer planet does mean a wetter planet and anyone who has walked in any part of desert can say wetter is better.
The Sahara was once forested as was the Great Basin. Siberia was once habitable and grapes grew wild in Scotland.