Pearls: No negativity here….

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

I learned years ago when I took oer the newspaper publishing role from my father that writing is an activity best done with a fresh mind. I observed that I could hammer out a story with few problems or pauses if I got to work on it in the morning, but by evening my thoughts would wander more. It’s tough to focus when you’re tired.

Fatigue draws to the surface the least desirable qualities for a writer: meandering ideas, negativity and lack of continuity being the most obvious ones. For me, I can tell you that as I grow wearier with the day’s demands, my writing gets a little bleaker, a little less optimistic That’s how you can tell whether my writing was done with a fresh mind or with an exhausted one: whether the tone is positive or negative.

Tonight, I’ll try to fake it. I’m ready to call it a day and hit the pillow, but you and I have things we need to think about, and you don’t need me drowning you in negativity.

So I’ll forego writing about how frustrated and weary I get with things never changing, with our fighting Middle Eastern wars and paying for them at the pump and with violence and scandal always consuming our national attention. Yeah, that’s all too negative.

Or I could write about how disgusted I was when Mr. Trump presented an image of himself as Jesus ministering to the sick with a healing hand. Or how I have told so many folks that his over-the-top messaging is a calculated move to put folks off guard, all for the purpose of expedting change, but his Easter post crossed a line that I will not condone. But that’s all pretty negative, too.

I guess if I were really tired I might talk about how shameful it would be if our state politicians forced school consolidations by starving public school districts into collapsing, all because they know that uttering the word consolidation would be career suicide for them – but underfunding small schools into ruin has more plausible deniability for the responsible politicians, right? Maybe Jefferson City will be able to se;ll the deceitful narrative that those districts have all been mismanaged financially all along, and then politicians can blame school leadership for the doors closing – deception plus deflection equals reelection. That’s pretty negative, though. I’ll steer clear.

Maybe instead I could write about the unconscionable use of iPads as a replacement for parenting in homes across the state and nation. Or how social skills develop when you put kids in the presence of human beings, not digital nannies. Or how members of entire generation are being digitally drugged into believing that interactive computer apps are the same as actual human interaction. But that’s a negativity trap, and I’m not going there.

If I were plumb exhausted, I might mention how we and literally every person we know are terrified of how far artificial intelligence has come, and absolutely panic stricken over how far AI will go before we come to our senses and shut the thing down – if that’s even possible by the end. I could write about how I lay in bed at night and wonder what jobs will even be left for my kids to do that AI hasn’t taken when they get ready to enter the workforce. That’s a whole new level of negativity, though, and you won’t catch me diving into that.

And if I were writing this just before I drifted off into a restless half-slumber, a stress-driven night of tossing and turning, I might write about what a struggle it has become to decide which idea makes me more apprehensive: staying conservative or leaning liberal. Neither camp wants guys like me anymore, it would seem.

But you deserve better than to have me drag you down, so I’ll just go to bed before I write something truly depressing.

Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.