Big World, Small Town
Any views or opinions expressed in “Big World, Small Town” are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Watershed Voice staff or its board of directors.
Thank you for taking the time to read the inaugural issue of Watershed Voice. This news organization is very important.
Now I know what you might be thinking. We are currently in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. These are scary times. People are losing their jobs. The economy is crashing, and worst of all, many people are dying.
How can this guy seriously say that a news organization, a news organization for crying out loud, is important in times like this?
Because it is.
Like most of you, my life has dramatically changed since the start of the COVID-19 crisis. I’ve been working from my basement for over two weeks now and haven’t been to church in three. I only see my friends via Zoom meetings or FaceTime chats, and I haven’t been able to go and hangout at my favorite coffee shop for what seems like an eternity. In the middle of March, I was in the process of buying the car I’ve wanted for so long, but the coronavirus has postponed those plans indefinitely.
In short, it’s really sucked. Not just for me, but also for millions of people across the globe.
So how did we get here?
That’s a long story and one that the global community is still trying to piece together. What we do know is that the disease we now call COVID-19 originated from a new coronavirus first identified near the city of Wuhan, China.
While China is a global economic powerhouse and the birthplace of both paper and gunpowder, it also happens to be run by a totalitarian communist government. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press do not exist in China, and the global community is now suffering in part because China does not have real journalists or real newspapers.
While all governments (and all people for that matter) have a tendency to cover up their mistakes, democratic countries have a free press to hold their leaders to account. China has no such checks on the power of the state. In China, there’s no independent media to speak truth to power. There is no voice for the people.
So when COVID-19 was discovered in China, the government covered it. They silenced the doctors that tried to alert the world community of the danger of this virus and detained others. As Nicholas Kristof wrote in a column in the New York Times, when the world needed the Chinese government to act, “act decidedly they did—not against the virus, but against the whistle-blowers who were trying to call attention to the public health threat.”
More recently, our free media has reported that the Chinese government also lied about the number of cases of COVID-19 and the number of their people who died from it. A report from Bloomberg noted that the U.S. intelligence community concluded reports out of China were “intentionally incomplete,” and two officials called the numbers “fake.”
The only reason I can share this with you in this column is because our country has a free press. Unlike in China, our government cannot censor what I write. Even Donald Trump, as rich and powerful as he is, cannot stop me from writing whatever I want for this publication.
Imagine how this public health crisis could have been different if there existed a publication like Watershed Voice in Wuhan, China. How much earlier would the world have known about COVID-19? What information could the brave doctors who first discovered the disease have shared had they not been muzzled by the government? How many lives could have been saved?
That’s why I’m glad you are supporting this publication.
We live in a time where much of the media is fragmented and politicized. You’ll hear one version of the truth on Fox News and a very different version on MSNBC. In times like these, we need multiple media outlets more than ever if we are to be conscientious citizens and informed voters.
I’m sure eventually you’ll read things in this paper you won’t like. But I hope you’ll see that as the opportunity that a free press gives us to take the opinions of others seriously. As people have been saying lately, we are all in this together, regardless of our political affiliation, religious beliefs or where we live.
Thank you again for supporting free and independent journalism. In the times that we’re living in, I don’t think it’s too dramatic to say you could be saving lives by doing so.
Charles D. Thomas is a writer and psychotherapist who made Three Rivers his home for over a decade. Feedback is welcome at [email protected].
