Annus Horribilis

22 Dec 2009

by Rebecca Rolfes

It has not been a great year. A lot of very bad things happened to good people. Two wars, the recession, high unemployment…well, you’ve heard about all that. I will not now bore you with Pollyanna’s rosy outlook but I would like to offer a year-end look at why I think we’ll get back to something like an annus mirabilis. John Dryden’s poem after all was written about 1666, the year of London’s Great Fire and the plague. Dryden’s point was that it could have been worse. So just as the glass is always half empty or full, it could also always be better. I see reason to believe it will.

• I make microloans through Kiva. I try to find women entrepreneurs in countries I’ve visited and loan them $50. I’ve been loaning the same $50 since my daughter set up an account for me on my birthday a couple of years ago. Five or six women have benefited from that $50, the most recent paying it back pennies at a time by selling tamales in a market. Now a lady named Noellie born on Christmas day in Africa will use it to buy coolers for her frozen fish business. The lesson here is that you cannot keep small businesses down. Cannot! Entrepreneurship is the engine that runs every economy, even in countries where the barriers to opening a business are huge. Small businesses have something that no salary can buy: passion. They want it bad. They want it enough to work longer, harder and over more years than anyone else. Yes, a lot of them fail, especially when credit is tight and banks are stingy and markets collapse. But it is absolutely impossible to keep them down.
• My industry is going up in flames. The death knell for print journalism started tolling years ago but the recession set a torch to the pyre. Layoffs in newsrooms, the disappearance of entire professions within the industry, the closure of storied titles make this an extremely bad time to be part of the Fourth Estate. Much as this pains me, we are in fact living through “the greatest explosion in personal self-expression of all time,” according to Clay Shirky.  Web 2.0, the read-write Web, enables everyman to be a journalist and, in the great tradition of Ben Franklin and citizen journalism, he is making use of the possibilities. And far from marking the death of good writing, the era is also improving literacy. Turns out that students now write more outside the classroom than in, what Andrea Lunsford, head of the Stanford Study of Writing, calls “life writing.” They write for an audience and have a much better sense of what that audience wants and how they want it—something they teach entire courses on in journalism school. Print is also a “stupid way” to deliver information, according to Alan Murray, deputy managing editor and executive editor online of The Wall Street Journal. Who knows whether we will all buy Condé Nast’s snazzy device that will make Sports Illustrated a mash-up of TV, print and talk radio?  But we’ll buy something. Journalism won’t die and a lot of trees will live.
• We will turn off Facebook. And Twitter and texting and…and…and. Well, not literally, at least not in all cases. I recently did a post about our over consumption of media  and much as I’d like a little break from the bombardment of information, I don’t see new media platforms being silenced. But I do see a rather desperate search for a respite from the cacophony of modern life. There are several books on how to find focus in the midst of it all. Rapt by Winifred Gallagher says, “You cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing.” A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland finds the joy, the peace, the calm of being still, if only for moments at a time.

 So as the year closes, take a deep breath. Be calm. Be joyful. We will be fine.

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