New Year’s Eve Eve 2023 dawned like most wake ups, routinely. Skipping the essentials, you might know the drill: bump up the thermostat, put on the coffee, put out the pup - after all, Cleo, our Border collie mix, got the ball rolling in the first place at first light - and then, cup in hand, peruse news and content on Twitter 𝕏 and Gmail. Who’s bombing who, who lied, who died, who canceled whomever. Doom scrolling can be as informative as it is addictive.
Grabbing my attention was the December 30th New York Times newsletter headline The Morning: Your best advice of 2023. Of course, my bull shit meter is normally pegged when I scroll through the “paper of record,” but this Words of Wisdom piece by Times Deputy editor of Culture and Lifestyle Melissa Kirsch seemed tame enough, maybe even good for a smile.
Saving money, reading more, eating healthy, drinking less; we’ve heard these innocuous litanies for decades. But Kirsch’s opening “solid maxim” for 2024, “‘No’ is a complete sentence,” was enough of a hook for me to read on, until I came to a resolution that might last through next week. A lady from Connecticut advised:
”Wear a watch. This way I pick up my phone half as often. How many times do you pick up yours to check the time and get sidetracked by 30 minutes of doom scrolling?
How simple is that? Wear a watch. With everything going on everywhere, spiraling out of control from San Francisco to Gaza, the last thing I need is one more distraction when what I really need is to shut down. And while a cheap Casio analog won’t do much for the early-morning roundup, a wrist watch might keep me from walking off a trail or a street corner to check notifications. I did notice I’m less phone addicted than my visiting teenage grandkids, but that’s hardly a bar to meet for 2024.
The New Year’s Eve edition of The Morning newsletter showed up in Gmail today, this time with predictions, past and future. So I naturally scrolled, two cups of coffee’s worth. No words of wisdom this morning, and no resolutions, but on Twitter 𝕏 I was stunned by a trending news post from Stella Assange on the death of John Pilger. One of the greatest journalists and documentary filmmakers of my lifetime passed away on Saturday, December 30th. Social media is still alive with testimonials to Pilger and his unwavering legacy of exposing imperialist foreign policy abuses from Vietnam to Gaza.
Another legendary truth-teller wrenched from the antiwar movement in 2023, first Daniel Ellsberg in June and now an investigative journalist as renowned as Australia’s John Pilger. Stella Assange said it best:
Our dear dear John Pilger has left us. He was one of the greats. A consistent ally of the dispossessed, John dedicated his life to telling their stories and awoke the world to the greatest injustices. He showed great empathy for the weak and was unflinching with the powerful.
Full disclosure, I came to know the works of John Pilger only 20 years ago, when my youngest was sent to Iraq. The peace movement became personal, and John was on my side. In his words,
There can’t be democracy and colonial war; one aspires to decency, the other to fascism. Meanwhile, once welcomed mavericks are heretics now in an underground of journalism amid a landscape of mendacious conformity.
A glimmer of hope for independent journalism with mavericks, “in a landscape of mendacious conformity,” like Aaron Maté, Glenn Greenwald, and Max Blumenthal doing the heavy lifting. But something tells me not to expect a Pilger bio in The Lives They Lived of the New Year’s Day edition of The Morning newsletter.
The death of John Pilger almost knocked the wind out of me.
Good, terse writing, Gene. You probably already are a fan of Frank Bruni or will become one after a couple of his brilliant essays.
We persist.