Guardian: noun   One that guards

Time magazine just named its Person(s) of the Year, the guardians. Here is an article about the choice followed by excerpts I thought mirrored my own stance and fight here in Whitehall. See if you see the similarities.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-guardians/ar-BBQNDh1?ocid=spartandhp

Excerpts:

“The stout man with the gray goatee and the gentle demeanor dared to disagree with his country’s government.”

But the crime would not have remained atop the world news for two months if not for the epic themes that Khashoggi himself was ever alert to, and spent his life placing before the public. His death laid bare the true nature of a smiling prince, the utter absence of morality in the Saudi-U.S. alliance and—in the cascade of news feeds and alerts, posts and shares and links—the centrality of the question Khashoggi was killed over: Whom do you trust to tell the story?

Khashoggi put his faith in bearing witness. He put it in the field reporting he had done since youth, in the newspaper editorship he was forced out of and in the columns he wrote from lonely exile. “Must we choose,” he asked in the Washington Post in May, “between movie theaters and our rights as citizens to speak out, whether in support of or critical of our government’s actions?” Khashoggi had fled his homeland last year even though he actually supported much of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s agenda in Saudi Arabia. What irked the kingdom and marked the journalist for death was Khashoggi’s insistence on coming to that conclusion on his own, tempering it with troubling facts and trusting the public to think for itself.

Such independence is no small thing. It marks the distinction between tyranny and democracy. And in a world where budding authoritarians have advanced by blurring the difference, there was a clarity in the spectacle of a tyrant’s fury visited upon a man armed only with a pen. Because the strongmen of the world only look strong. All despots live in fear of their people. To see genuine strength, look to the spaces where individuals dare to describe what’s going on in front of them.

This ought to be a time when democracy leaps forward, an informed citizenry being essential to self-government. Instead, it’s in retreat. Three decades after the Cold War defeat of a blunt and crude autocracy, a more clever brand takes nourishment from the murk that surrounds us. The old-school despot embraced censorship. The modern despot, finding that more difficult, foments mistrust of credible fact, thrives on the confusion loosed by social media and fashions the illusion of legitimacy from supplicants.”

‘”Modern misinformation”, says David Patrikarakos, author of the book War in 140 Characters, titled after the original maximum length of a Twitter post, “does not function like traditional propaganda. It tries to muddy the waters. It tries to sow as much confusion and as much misinformation as possible, so that when people see the truth, they find it harder to recognize.”

Summation:

Standing up to authoritarians and tyrants in government seems to be a more daunting task these days. While I claim no connection to any journalism degrees or titles, I am still a citizen, a town crier if you will, reporting on my government’s less honorable behaviors and actions, that which gets me a lot of backlash and upset. I take it as par for the course. It is a task I’ve undertaken and stood resolute in. There is wrong and I am unbowed in my efforts to chisel away at the granite of the citizen’s disbelief, apoplectic fury and vested interests of those who want me to take my “big, stupid words” and “shut up!”, “move” and “be gone with you!” After all, wrong is wrong is wrong.

To the left is a photo of myself with a gift a Whitehall citizen gave me in light of my efforts to stand up to wrong in my government and speak out. It is a print of Norman Rockwell’s ‘Four Freedom’s’ series of paintings (Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear), this is ‘Freedom of Speech’. Nick Purdin, who ran the ‘No on Issue 37’ Facebook page told me he saw this in a building he frequented and looking at it, he’d always thought of me. He ordered the print online and gave it to me as a gift. It is the most important and meaningful thing I’ve received in connection to my work trying to right wrongs here in my hometown of Whitehall and worth much more than any council seat.