So What is "Rear View Mirror" Anyway

"Let's get down to the Nitty Gritty", let's get the show on the road..."

I’m not unaware that I haven’t yet sufficiently told you what “Rear View Mirror” is, why I’m starting it, and why I asked you to subscribe to it (and so many of you kindly agreed to!). The short, or, “Twitter” answer is, I intend for this space to be somewhere where America’s past can potentially be a roadmap for her future, because I think we can all agree, this existence as “one nation indivisible” is absolutely not passing the smell-test.

But perhaps our shared experience means that it eventually can.

If you’ve followed me on social media for more than, oh, three days or so, you know I have some serious complaints about my country ‘tis of thee. The list of challenges we are collectively facing rivals that of any time since our founding. It also doesn’t help that we can’t even seem to agree on exactly when our founding took place.

Our planet is facing arguably its biggest crisis in the history of humanity, and Our Country has been among the slowest to take action. It’s nothing new or unexpected. President Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) fifty years ago. Despite this realization, we’re not quite thirty years out from when then-President George Bush the Literate mocked Vice Presidential Nominee Al Gore as “Ozone Boy”.

How is it that after fifty years and with overwhelming evidence that mankind is destroying the climate, we still can’t accept the reality and work to “save the children” that people so frequently love to say in an unironic fashion, not realizing the depths of their hypocrisy?

We have to do better.

We forcibly shuttered the last of our forced-labor plantations over 150 years ago, but in the last decade we’ve seen cases involving Michael Brown, Philando Castille, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and others force us to ask the question “are we still feeling the effects of a law enforcement system that evolved from plantation security?”

An overwhelming majority of Americans, primarily due to rote memorization from childhood and certainly not from conviction singing that we are the “land of the free” before every event from a kindergarten kickball game to the Super Bowl, yet we incarcerate people at a higher rate than any other nation on earth.

Thirty Four states are currently imprisoning more people per 100,000 residents than the next COUNTRY on the list (El Salvador, with 562 people per). The Cajun state almost doubles that alone, locking up 1,094 per 100K residents. This is a generation-ruining crisis and we’ve been absolutely too slow to respond to it.

What makes this even more appalling is that there is genuine bipartisan support to make serious changes. Yet the statistics continue to tell a different story.

We need to be better.

As I sit here typing this, I can tell that the occasional lump in my throat when I swallow is due to the anxiety about the newly discovered Omicron Variant.

Look, I get it. I know there’s no malicious intent in sharing Bill Murray/”Groundhog’s Day” memes about yet another mutation. If you’re not suffering from COVID fatigue, you’ve probably got more mental health issues than I do. It’s been taxing. It’s been devastating and roughly two years after patient zero, we still can’t have a moment to take stock of all that we have lost.

But this, unfortunately, is a catastrophe that we don’t have the luxury of tuning out. It’s not inflation or an impeachment. It’s not a tax cut or a sex scandal. It’s public health and it’s our own survival as people, as family units, as communities, countries and inhabitants of that planet between Venus and Mars.

We have to remain vigilant, despite our cravings for whatever passes for “normalcy” these days.

And finally, the two pillars of the United States of America are under attack: Democracy and Education.

You saw the same tragic events unfold on January Sixth of this year with your own eyes. I did as well. Most unfortunately, so did the world. No ambiguity. No gray area. No debate.

Still, a concerted effort exists to convince just enough people that what they witnessed wasn’t true. Ill-intentioned men and women who seek to harm our institution so they can impose a very dangerous system of minority rule are working around the clock to change the narrative about who was responsible for the insurrection and what the motivating factors were.

Along the same vein, these folks are also seeking to toss out the darker yet accurate periods and events of our shared History with the intention of indoctrinating a generation of students into thinking that no matter what the circumstance – American power and the American powerful are not to be questioned.

I have studied history academically and recreationally ever since my reading comprehension skills developed over an issue of Highlights Magazine many years ago. History matters. History can be our guide.

The original 103 people who have subscribed to this newsletter may be the only people I ever reached, but I’m not going to sit back and watch history get abused and manipulated without saying my piece.  

Finally, just a quick note about why I’m choosing this platform as opposed to simply sharing my articulated posts on my Facebook Writer’s Page.

The simple answer is, Facebook is dying, dude. Not “dying” in the sense that they’ll be “myspace” any time soon, but I read a great comparison of “Meta” to Big Tobacco in the 80s and 90s. Yes, more and more Americans will get turned off by it, but there’s a whole globe of people willing to be abused by their product.

Furthermore, from my individual writing to my collaborative projects in the past, it’s so disheartening when some algorithm determines whether or not YOU see the content that YOU signed up to see.

I’ve been following some writers on Substack, and wouldn’t you know it, I never miss their musings!  

The dialogue is more adult. Opinions are thought out. And most importantly, the troll-quotient is close to zero. You won’t find wild conspiracy theories like “Widespread Voter Fraud”.

Many of us have wasted hours – days even – of our lives debating the obvious with people who simply will never accept a thought that isn’t birthed in the dystopian world of Fox News and its imitators.

So feel free to comment away to your heart’s desire. I promise you a pleasant and hopefully engaging conversation.

For many, many years now, I have been toying with the idea of making writing my alpha focus. I have finally arrived at a place where I believe I can give it the effort it deserves with the urgency it requires.

And I’m not just talking “fast and sensational”. I firmly believe that most news readers have long since moved on from shocking click bait tweets, Facebook posts, email subjects or push-alerts. And with twenty years in the journalism profession, frankly, I’m getting quite tired of the grossly overused term “Breaking News”.

Its my intention to make this space geared much more towards in-depth analysis as opposed to the screaming and yelling that has dominated our discourse for the last decade.

I hope you’ll enjoy what’s said and reported here at “Rear View Mirror” and I’m genuinely excited about the early following and the potential to foster a community and maybe even reconnect with some other brilliant minds who have taken their talents away from “The Book”. And if you do, in fact, enjoy what you see – I would be honored if you shared it.

Newsletters and articles will always be shared here at least 8 hours before Facebook (which you wouldn’t see unless you went to the page anyway), so to paraphrase American Express, “Subscriber-ship has its privileges”

Have a great Wednesday,

-Ed