For the record

About 14 years ago, when I retired from the trade of journalism and my end-of-career job writing news releases and propaganda for a college, a former student worker came to visit me and encouraged me to create a blog. My response: “What is a blog?”

She explained the concept of posting my writing on the internet as a sort of personal journal: my interests, thoughts, and ruminations. “No one,” I told her, “could possibly be interested in anything I would write.”

Tactfully, she told me she had another purpose in mind. Writing had been my life’s work for more than 50 years, she said, and walking away from my love for the written word, a cold-turkey break from my addiction, was seriously damaging my mental and emotional state. I was becoming cynical, pessimistic, skeptical, negative, gloomy, and grouchy, she said. And probably clinically depressed.

“I’m an old curmudgeon?” I asked

“More or less,” she said.

So I took up writing again. It seemed to help.

My first blog site was Dispatches from a Northern Town. I wrote and posted essays and stories – humorous, heartwarming, melancholy, joyful – about small town life, outdoor sports, grandchildren, dogs, and misadventures in a world becoming strange and confusing. A friend suggested I compile these stories and publish them in hard copy and e-books. I published nine of these anthologies. Another friend suggested I should try writing a novel. I wrote and published four.

For the record, these books are listed here: Jerry Johnson Author Page

My former student was correct. Writing did preserve my sanity and emotional balance. More or less.

Then America entered its Dark Ages. My writing style, content, and purpose took a different direction. With that change, I switched to a different website, and published my essays on Substack with the title Zumbro Current. Most of these recent postings have been of a more serious nature, many dripping with political or social venom.

My words of outraged warning echo those of a main character in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Player Piano,” the Episcopal minister and anthropologist James J. Lasher. Lasher is aware that his opposition to a cruel and dehumanizing government and society is futile, but he “is doing this for the record” in the hope that some future historian, in whatever civilization may emerge from the ruins of this world we are destroying, will discover that not all people stumbled blindly and unthinkingly into disaster.

Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, Joyce Vance, Paul Krugman and many other wise and experienced writers are not blind and unthinking. They see it coming, and they write warnings about the catastrophe that will overwhelm and destroy freedom and democracy in the United States. We are plunging toward an autocratic, oligarchic, and white christian nationalist government that will lead our country into civil disorder and violence, nuclear war, and environmental disasters.

Although my audience is much smaller than theirs, I am also writing “for the record.”