In Sebastian Junger’s book, “The Perfect Storm,” he accomplished the virtuoso feat of making the science behind the weather enjoyable reading for the laymen. What Hollywood depicted as one big storm, Junger turned into a fascinating character study of wind and weather.
The title of Junger’s book derived from the observation that the storm was so cataclysmic because the events that created it had to be just right: perfect in a sense.
Three individual weather systems came together, and fed off each other; ultimately pummeling the East Coast of the United States, in an event so unexpected, one of the largest storms in recorded history was never even formally named.
Junger’s “Perfect Storm” comes to mind this week as we look ahead to 2009.
This year marks the 134th consecutive year of operation for The Lincoln County News. We were established the year before Custer was wiped out at Little Bighorn, 28 years before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk and 116 years before the events described in Junger’s book.
As of this writing, the media industry is changing at stunning speed. Even as you read this, the industry at large is responding to the will of the market and technology forces by constantly morphing into a new animal. What it will be at the end of this year is different from what it is now, which is different from what it was six months ago. It is at once an exciting and somewhat disconcerting time to be in the newspaper business.
In the big picture, years of corporate conglomeration has resulted in less and less reliable news coverage as the circle of control at the top grows smaller and smaller. In recent years we have seen direct competitors fold, others sold and sold again, and larger concerns shrink to mere shells of their former glory.
In Lincoln County, our local officials continue to wrestle with increasingly onerous regulatory and financial constraints passed down by the Legislature. Statewide, we are still saddled with ill conceived and force-fed consolidation efforts, an $800 million deficit and God only knows what our chief executive has in store for us this year.
The challenges facing our next president beggar the imagination, ranging from the world’s diminishing oil, food, and clean water supplies, to nuclear arms proliferation and the growing economic and political power of China and India.
At home, we have numerous complex domestic issues on the agenda including economy, energy, immigration, education, national infrastructure, and the environment, to name a few
Everywhere we look this year, we have a challenge, but if our past is anything of a guide, we are going to thrive.
American history is the story of challenges, beginning with the first European refugees to land on these shores in search of a new life in the 17th century to the push to the moon in the 20th.
Ultimately, all of our choices brought us to here and our only option now is to go up sea or down.
Batten down the hatches and hang on.
