You shall not steal your neighbor’s integrity or twist truth into lies.
Integrity matters.
Here is an excerpt from THE EIGHTH COMMANDMENT, The sSow Death of Local Journalism – By John T Hourihan Jr.
“The day before the trial was to start, Kevin went to the lake that he had always found comforting.
The lake was in the woods where he had fished when he was a boy. He sat on an old and rotted log at the water’s edge. A translucent green firefly hovered in the sunshine, barely gripping the tip of a stock of grass, and looked at Kevin from a few feet away. The iridescent bug was one of the oldest beings on the planet. It flitted from flower to grass stalk in the sun-filled afternoon, and the high-pitched whine of the cicadas was a welcomed backdrop to his thoughts.
“Why the hell am I doing this?” Kevin thought.
“My family doesn’t want me to. People in the town don’t want the complications? I’m being threatened from everywhere; my church probably even stopped me from telling the truth about them; and the people I work for won’t back me up. Why is it so damn difficult to tell the truth? Why is the truth so important when no one wants to hear it?
“They don’t want to be informed,” the dragon fly seemed to tell him. It left the grass shoot and flew closer to his face.
“They just want to be entertained.”
Kevin thought about this past handful of years. It was a distinct possibility that he had helped build a memorial for a group of dead soldiers no one wanted to remember. He had brought to light seeming corruption and lawlessness by those who were supposed to be enforcing the laws and then helped save a policeman’s job because it was the right thing to do.
He made people aware of the innocence of a kid who had been arrested for nothing, had pointed out cancer-causing chemicals leaking into the river, had illuminated a scheme to pay fewer taxes by a rich man, helped prevent a town wide conflagration, helped put an end to traffic taxing in a small town, helped house a burned-out family, and explained the use of the daily police log.
“Damn,” he told the dragonfly, who was now hovering around his head. “I have shown them the fraud, corruption, double-dealing, brutality, lawlessness, pollution, and lack of safety that exists right in the middle of their lives. I pointed out that some young people are doing good for their communities and helped add money to worthwhile fundraisers. And what do I get for it? I get threatened by lawyers and thugs. And the only thing they really like is the jokes, the sex, the outrageous.
The story that people liked the most was the one about the black man who was looking for a job in Faithville, and when he was inevitably told no, he had headed for the center of town to use the phone booth, and within an eighth of a mile he was arrested for being “a suspicious looking person.”
In other words, he was arrested for being black in a white town. Kevin had said it was pure racism, the same racism that hid behind the red lines in the real estate corners of even a small Unitarian, New England hamlet.
He pointed out that the racial hatred that had lain dormant, under rocks and behind trees in the “land of the free,” was beginning to come out into the light again, but that isn’t what readers had seen. What he heard most from the folks in coffee shops that week was that they thought it was funny. That a man was arrested for the color of his skin made them laugh.
“This journalism thing isn’t heading in a good direction as far as I can see,” Kevin said out loud, and watched as the dragon fly flew into the woods and landed on an ancient, rusted yellow steamroller.
The Eighth Commandment: Hourihan, John T: 9781948979962: Amazon.com: Books