Books Read in our Youth

 The books we read in our youth contain the fables, metaphors, and lessons we carry with us the rest of our lives. At this point in my life to go back and investigate the likes of Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald gives me great satisfaction, as it does for many I presume.

The same cannot be said of newspapers. I don't know when they became a seemingly guilty pleasure, but they are now. Maybe when they became $3.00 on the newsstand and the old newspaper boxes were sent to warehouses and converted to other uses. I still read the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal and even have them delivered to my apartment building. The Times, "The Gray Lady", remains a link to my youth and a source of opinions and news from around the world for me.

Here's the opening paragraph of a 1951 Life article entitled "The Gray Lady Reaches 100":

The Old Gray Lady will celebrate her 100th birthday this Sept. 18. The "lady" is a newspaper -- the New York Times -- regarded by many in the world at large (and all within its own world) as the world's greatest. And newsmen generally hail it as "old" and "gray" by way of acknowledging its traditional special marks: starch conservatism and circumspection.

I support the term circumspect but not starch conservatism. I am wary of the risks that some politicians would like to take with our society's safety net and I am firmly in support of government being the mechanism to regulate the greedy, educate our children, build our roads, and provide for the common defense. These ideas cannot be produced and maintained by any private entity. The more people sit back and rail against the poor, malnourished, and ill-educated who are rapidly becoming a majority, the more I find solace in firebrands like John Steinbeck.

 I can also take comfort from reading Fitzgerald who is mostly remembered for the elegance of Gatsby but who was really critiquing a time similar to our own today. The huge parties and the vast income disparity can be seen on today's Long Island just as clearly as Fitzgerald described it so eloquently. He may have been an actor taking part in these outrageous events, especially when he came into money for The Great Gatsby. Though this takes nothing away from what he was writing about and the heartfelt reflection it contains.