Yesterday, November 12, 2017, I attended a memorial service for Peggy Fern at Green’s Sanctuary on Ebenezer Avenue.  We worked together teaching at Northwestern High School. She was a kind of a queen as observed by her eulogizers.  To my mind she was a bit haughty and somewhat imperious.  I admired her professionalism, her dedication to her husband John who suffered from ALS, and her love of travel.  I saw her as proud but vulnerable, though definitely not one to invite sympathy.  She was outwardly very confident and secure in who she was.

That loops me back to this collection of my thinking.  It is who I am or was, should anyone care to know as per my statement “Why I Am Writing danielforrest.org.”  I will be found in these words in this blog, not in an auditorium such as Green’s.

Briefly former teachers formed a kind of quick-to-dissolve community at Green’s.  We shared admiration for our colleague and news about ourselves as we walked out of the service in small clusters.  I hankered for a way to further our exchange of news.

I am the news: not the breaking news rather the continuing on-going analytical news of the times that binds us together.  I like knowing what is going on and trying to understand current events.  Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian interference in our last election and the rapid warming of the planet are stories I come to again and again to puzzle over.  They represent what I think about during my time on Earth.

The news of our time is who we are as a people.  A week ago another mass murder occurred and there was just another ho hum.  I wrote my representatives in Washington and a letter to The Charlotte Observer to give some release to my deep anger at the idea that military assault weapons should be available for civilians.  The national nonresponse to yet another mass murder is news. It is who we are as a nation.

The news is a reflection of me; therefore I am out sorts in a weekly news cycle that features President Trump saying he believes President Putin is sincere in not interfering in our last election, mass murder becoming ordinary, climate change continuing to be ignored, and an old English teacher friend dying. .

If I could talk to you, I would not seek to bend your opinion my way on an issue by issue basis, but I would I like to converse about what is happening because what is happening–the news–is who we are as a people.  It is a journey and a chance to discover the world.  Why is talking about it so difficult?  Why am I thought odd for taking such a keen interest in it?  Why is it ignored or disbelieved and contorted by the likes of Fox and Breitbart?

Now you have a better idea of who I was and who you are because of the news.  We are news because news is communal.

Sheryl Tharpe’s eulogy included a report of Peggy’s love of television.  Sheryl and Peggy liked watching Poldark.  I liked hearing that because it bound me to the two of them.  By the way, I do not like that PBS series but Nita does.  My connection to that broadcast is small news but a way of understanding who Peggy was.  I end with that news that somehow soothes me a bit.