Here at the Reporter, we've gotten used to people accusing us of having an "agenda."
Variously defined by different people, these agendas have been described as "anti-Elia," "pro-Maziarz," "liberal," "anti-Bush," "pro-Anello," "communist" and so on and so on.
Well, I'm here today to tell you that yes, indeed, we do have an agenda. In fact, we've got a couple.
First and foremost, our agenda is to run a successful business. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Most startup businesses fail during the first year, and many startup publications fail before, during, or immediately after their first issue hits the streets. Somehow, so far, we've managed to dodge those bullets.
Simply stated, our aim is to become rich and retire as early as possible.
I'm sorry to report we haven't yet achieved that goal. But rest assured, we will endeavor to persevere and, with any luck at all, will be living on a beach somewhere and voting Republican in just a few years.
Well, living on a beach, anyway.
This is an agenda I can embrace. Staba, Bruce and the Redhead embrace it as well, except on those frequent occasions when we're all screaming at each other and can't agree about anything.
Capitalism's a great thing. It enabled us to enter into the "marketplace of ideas," take our best shot and see where it landed us. So far, so good, which brings us to our second agenda.
The fortunes of the Reporter are tied directly to the fortunes of the Niagara region. After all, the more successful businesses there are, the more advertising dollars there are for us to rake in. And you can't have successful businesses unless you've got plenty of people with well-paying jobs who can afford to go out to dinner, buy cars, appliances, clothes and other commodities.
Hence our motto, "To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." That's a line generally attributed to the great newspaper publisher E.W. Scripps, but it was passed on to me by another great newspaper publisher, George R. Sample.
Niagara Falls wouldn't be in the miserable shape it's in were it not for the miserable, and often criminal, qualities of our elected leadership over the past few decades. Taxes have gone through the roof and industry has fled, taking the best and the brightest of our young people with it and leaving behind an environmental mess nobody in charge made them clean up.
From City Hall to the county Legislature and from Albany to Washington, D.C., our leaders have "led" us to where we are today. Not only is that bad for business, it's bad for everyone.
So we take our cue from Tom Joad, as played by Henry Fonda, in John Ford's film of the Steinbeck novel "The Grapes of Wrath." He's talking to his mother, played by the great Jane Darwell, after she catches him sneaking out of a Depression-era California labor camp in order to avoid a charge of murder for killing a strikebreaker.
She asks how she'll know where he is.
"I'll be all around in the dark," he tells her. "I'll be everywhere, wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat -- I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy -- I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready."
It's a real conundrum. How can you want to be rich when your real sympathies lie with the mostly poor, mostly rural men and women serving in Iraq? With the millions of unemployed around the country. Or with the impoverished people here in Niagara Falls who never see one cent of the state and federal money that pours into City Hall solely because of the fact that those very same people live in substandard housing, are underemployed and are subject to spiraling rates of crime.
Cynically speaking, you could say it's a bottom-line issue with us. If we had more people doing well here, we would be doing better.
So, anyway, there they are. Those are the Reporter's subversive agendas summed up in 700-odd words. We want to be rich and we don't want to see crooks or nut-cases in positions of power. As goes Niagara Falls, so goes the Niagara Falls Reporter.
I wish us both the best of luck.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 16 2003 |