On Morning Joe this morning Bryan Williams was lamenting the imminent demise of newspapers. Several of the big papers, including the New York Times and Chicago Tribune, and a lot of the smaller ones are on the verge of bankruptcy. He said that this will cause people to rely more on internet news and opinion sites, and he is worried that the people running the internet sites and providing the reporting won’t be “classically trained” as journalists.

I wonder what he thinks the people now working for the newspapers will do after their employers close their doors. I would think they will just turn to the internet. In fact, a lot of them already have. Most all newspapers of any size already publish most or all of their content on the web. Some of them require subscriptions for access but most offer free access and rely on advertising for revenue. The New York Times switched to free access a year or two ago.

Yes, there are a lot of web sites out there putting out unreliable news and opinion (like this one?), but there are also a lot of printed “rags” out there too.

The cost of publishing and distributing print versions is huge. Without this cost some of them might survive by turning exclusively to the internet.

I wonder what Williams thinks the institutions that “classically train” jounalists and publishers will do after the newspapers go away. I would think they will start training them to operate on the internet.

Apparently he thinks we can’t adapt to significant change. Perhaps he’s still puzzled about how we managed to move from horse-drawn vehicles to cars and trucks.

People today seem to think divisiveness is always bad. Some oppose making English the official language of the United States of America because they feel it would be divisive. Did these same people oppose the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s because they feared it would be divisive? Have they not heard of the “divide and conquer” strategy?

The civil rights movement was extremely divisive initially but eventually resulted in more unity than existed before the movement. I believe that encouraging immigrants to learn English would result in less divisiveness in the long term, and improve the ability of the immigrants to thrive in this country.

Our system of government pretty much guarantees that any action taken by Congress is going to be divisive, at least in the short term. Some will like it and some won’t. It will help some and hurt others. The government itself is divided by design. You won’t total unity? Move to Zimbabwe.

That some action will be divisive is not a valid argument for or against the action. It’s certainly not a sufficient argument against it. A proposed action should be judged on its expected final results more than its potential inconveniences during implementation.

People often admonish others not to worry so much. They say things like ‘take one day at a time’ or ‘live for today and let tomorrow take care of itself’. A popular song advised us: “Don’t worry, be happy.” The title of this post was the signature phrase of Alfred E. Neuman, a fictional character in Mad magazine. For the most part these people mistake thinking and planning for worrying. I believe that if you spend no time thinking about tomorrow you will eventually join the ranks of the homeless bums.

Of course the intent of some is to console the heavily laden, to encourage the discouraged, or to lighten our lives with a little humor. But I frequently see evidence that some people take the advice literally; they live like there is no tomorrow. I have encountered people who don’t think they need to plan for the future because they strongly believe that God will take care of them. These same people believe that God works in mysterious ways, but they don’t seem to consider the possibility that the way God will take care of them is to let them die of starvation or hypothermia. I think what these people really mean is that their family, friends and neighbors will take care of them.

I don’t believe a person should spend countless hours organizing every trivial detail of his or her life, but I do believe that some time spent in thinking about and planning for the future will mitigate a lot of worries.