When Dick the Butcher said "first thing, let's kill all the lawyers," you can be pretty sure the journalists weren't far down his list.

I practiced journalism for about a quarter of a century. I wasn't very good, to be honest, but I was at least a faithful practitioner. And by that I mean I wrote hundreds of obituaries and rewrote thousands of press releases, attended and reported on town council meetings and school board meetings and county commissions and public service districts, enjoyed strong coffee with a local police chief or a county prosecutor every weekday and occasionally got to interview someone amazing like Dr. Timothy Leary or Johnny Cash.

Good times, all those, interspersed with deadly boring things like trying to understand a school district's budgetary priorities or calculating the average homeowner's annual share of the burden for a planned water rate increase. Some part of me thought then, as I do now, that this stuff might be important to readers of what we then called, quaintly and correctly, a "newspaper."

I don't want to waste time waxing nostalgic about The Press or (worse) The Media. They now are what they are now, and often I'm not happy with what they've become, but I still think they're important in the grand scheme of a larger democratic society.

Instead of criticism, I want to offer a small bit of comfort and encouragement to the journalists who replaced me and my generation on the front lines of a dramatically different world. Truly, now more than ever, it's a jungle out there. Some of us feel the feels for the young women and men (and non-cis journalists too) who take on the rich, the powerful and the sometimes incalculably stupid.

I just want to say we're here for you. Reading. Thinking. Caring. Voting. Sometimes praying for you, or with you, that life gets a little better for all of us thanks to your thoughtful scrutiny of our public affairs.

It isn't my words I want to focus on in this moment, but Gertrude Stein's:

Narrative concerns itself with what is happening all the time, history concerns itself with what happens from time to time. And that is perhaps what is the matter with history, and that is what is perhaps the matter with narrative ...

Read that again, maybe a few times, especially if you're a person who writes or blogs or broadcasts for a paltry living as I did. Then read on. Again, Gertrude Stein:

It does happen – it is bound to happen – that the way of telling anything can come not to mean anything to the one telling that thing.

I said newspapers make things too easy, and I said that once to a reporter and he said, 'You have no idea, I am sure, how terribly hard we work.' 'Yes,' I said, 'but after you have done all that hard work you have to write it up as it would be if you had known it all beforehand, and that is what really makes it all too easy.'

There is no discovery – there is mostly no discovery – in a newspaper or in history, they find out things they never knew before but there is no discovery, and finally, if all this goes on long enough, it is all too easy.

I believe she was right. By making it "too easy," we may sometimes misrepresent the truth. By removing the wonder, the discovery, we risk serving up something akin to cold leftover salmon. And this coming from a guy who likes cold salmon on a cracker, but also recalls the wonder of watching those magnificent squirming creatures writhe upstream.

Life is just that messy. Government at all levels is messy. Sometimes the messiness is deliberate, but more often it's just people being their messy selves. Their moms and dads never taught them to pick up their clothes or take their shoes off, and their messes now bleed over into everything they do, and they bleed all over us, all the time.

It happens. And when it happens, as it happens, a good journalist writes about it. Sometimes people even read what's written.

But here's the thing: just as a restaurant patron rarely says anything about the food unless it's been botched, a journalist rarely hears that a story landed hard and well. You only hear the complaints. And boy, do they come in loud and clear.

I'm here to thank you for all the times you get it right. What you do matters to me, even if it didn't matter to the people you hoped you'd reach. And yeah, I'm just one person but dammit I am a person, so deal with that.

Journalists, one and all, please don't ever give up on the truth-telling. Because if you do, the only people who can save us are those poor lawyers who escape the Butcher's purge. I doubt they'll be much help.