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[you folks compose much better titles/heads than I, so please, g
December 25, 2009 | 01:30 PM

Jacob, in the business you're in (not to mention the general business of merely intending to be an intelligent human on earth)' I imagine what a challenge it is to walk a journalist's invisible line between having your B.S.-detectors always fully in active mode, and simultaneously being able to hear and receive the communications others give you with some sense of openness/trust that something in the endless soup of words is sometimes accurate or true.
I see you as a being of outstanding intelligence, integrity, and ethical discernment. Yet it also seems to me--ironic as it may be---that when one is in the position of community journalist, one is somewhat disempowered by an inability to use that position to truly garner and focus active support in specific directions, toward specific causes and ends. Instead it seems one must wear this inhuman mask of "objective impartiality" or some other such academic journalistic theory. Of course, you're much better and clearer than, say, Edwin Tanji, the columns of whom somehow display the attitude that...there's nothing wrong in the world, and nothing can be done about anything, and everything is equally meaningless. Of course, it makes sense that such would be a convenient attitude to promulgate if one is hired by the corporate oligarchy to assist in sustaining and perpetuating their comfortable status quo.
I can't help but wonder...you simply seem too highly intelligent to have peacefully accepted a position as a paid talking head...er, I mean...typing head. You write excellent articles...and I'm glad that you're in that position if someone's gotta be there, but I wonder if you feel you're accomplishing as much for this community as you could be---in terms of community results. How often do you notice firm evidence of community changes arising from the work that you've been doing? (I'm not doubting such is the case; this is kind of a devil's advocate question, and I'd simply like to know what positive changes you've seen from the view in your seat, and do you have a sense that your professional identity prevents you from communicating or 'activating' in way that might induce some inner discomfort for you. I'm coming from the belief that if we actually had any true media of interactive 'free speech in operation, our human communities could never be capable of having traveled so far down the road toward fear, division, and the imminent destruction of the biosphere offered us by mainstream insanity in general.


Jeffrey Turnbull