I wanted to be a journalist, but then I met some of the students who were majoring in the field at my local university. The superficiality and lack of intelligence were profound. I was completely put off of it when a survey revealed that about 90% of journalism students were pursuing the field because they wanted to change the world. I don’t recall if any of them wanted to report what actually happened. Probably not.
One of my friends in the school became a volunteer firefighter and inspired me to become a volunteer E.M.T. We were working together at the school when one of the journalism students asked us to videotape a story to help the homeless. This was in 1985.
“How are you going to help the homeless?”
“We are going to have a protest.”
“How is that going to help the homeless?”
“We are raising awareness.”
My friend rolled his eyes at the notion of ‘look at me’ activism, but I had a question. There was a homeless mission nearby; I knew this because once in a while my mother gave them food from her church and I would deliver it.
So I said, “Well, there’s a soup kitchen right down the road from here in Paterson. If you want to help the homeless, they’d love for you to show up in the morning and help feed them.” The journalism student lurched backwards, put up his open palms as if to prevent such an offensive thought from actually touching him, and blurted out, “Oh, I would never do that.”
Of course not. The homeless people at the soup kitchen were all black. Racism is a funny thing. If you can not hold onto a man while he is suffering or dying because he is black or Jewish or something, you will weed yourself out of the 911 system very quickly. Some people accuse everyone else of prejudice, the rest of us can’t understand what they mean. My friend told the journalism student that we didn’t have time to do his story and he went away.
I tried to get back into journalism locally last year. I might have even posted about it here. Something about it again put me off. A director I dealt with seemed to meausure the depth of a man by how much he could boast. I think that sums up the profession.
I know what you mean. I thought that I would like to get into journalism until I served on the readers advisory board of our local paper for a year. The liberalism that existed there really disillusioned me. Took all of the want to right away.