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 By Ray Suarez Journalists don’t like to admit it, but they often head out into the world with a pretty good idea of what they intend to find. The story is already writing itself when they should still be wondering, searching, curious. We go to bad places to live to report the news. We write little morality plays. We talk to local people armed with our pads and pencils and our own expectations that they are as anxious to get out of there as we would be. We emissaries from the middle class dropping by to pass our judgment on them. It’s not that we’re insensitive creeps, exploiters, or worse. It is more often the rushed nature of our business. We parachute into people’s lives, cast them in our dramas, and move on. We are also prisoners of the conventions of journalistic narratives: local heroes, self-sacrificing neighbor, tragic victims, bright promise ending in sorrow. We get few opportunities to know, or to show, the struggles of our neighbors. Their problems are presented formulaically, not as dispatches from the other side of town, but from what might as well be the other side of the world. Every night, in cities large and small, we commit the verbal equivalents of drive-by shootings. Once in St. Louis, I talked to a young single mother in a rundown part of that once thriving city. We met by the school where she was a volunteer. She introduced me to other members of her neighborhood crime watch. I asked her where she would go if she could get away from this corner of north St. Louis, and she immediately set me straight. She loved her neighborhood. She had struggled for years to make it a better place. Why would she leave now that she could see some of her efforts finally bearing fruit? (To read the entire FOREWORD download the PDF file) |