POV: You Work at NYT

Imagine working at the largest publication in the United States. The coffee flows faster than you can drink it. Your desk, at home, is a veritable waste of recycled paper and ink. Half of what you write is never read. Half of that is never seen. Half of that is never published. Almost all of it doesn’t matter.

But that’s not what you tell yourself. You’re a journalist. Shine the spotlight in the darkness. Be the voice for the voiceless. Take a rubber bullet in the crotch for that $500 freelance gig in Little Beirut/Anarchic District/Portland/Your Home Town. You’re out there making a difference.

Even if the algos get you down, push your groundbreaking stuff, the relevant stuff, the words that you think can save democracy, you have yourself. Maybe you’ve won awards. These are things that mean something to others in your most noble profession. But even if you have them, chances are the issues you talk about still exist.

That’s when you remember the story of your friend, Liz Shepherd. Combat Correspondent. Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Ukraine—in that order. She told you shit don’t change. No matter how you describe a body vaporizing from the explosive pressure change of a humvee tripping an IED made from Reagan-era munitions given to insurgents to fight Soviets, shit don’t change. 

Even when you talk about those same munitions popping up all over the world, sold and exchanged like love letters to violent dissidents, no one back home cares. Because it’s part of our reality now. It’s your reality. You construct it in the papers, shove it in people's faces, and win awards for it.

That’s when you log off your computer. You stand up from your desk chair, walk 8 paces across your rent-controlled apartment with boutique, antique, heirloom leather furniture to the bar cart featuring too much Seagrams and not enough McClellan 45. Ice falling in the glass. It’s your school’s out bell. Close your eyes. Deep breath. Let it out. Sit on the couch and count the ways you’d like the world to change. Then do nothing but drink what’s in your hand, presumably gin on the rocks. Because McClellan isn’t for daily consumption. 

You are warming up. The muscles in your lower back release. You slouch down, sliding against the leatherback. Your ass is hanging off the couch. Only your back is holding you up now. Then, let yourself fall to the floor. Place the gin on your coffee table. Don’t forget the coaster. Never forget the coaster.

Now, pray that shitty things keep happening. Laugh a little. You don’t want them to happen, but you need them to keep your job. You need unarmed black men killed to win that Pulitzer prize, or a novelist who committed suicide, or a school built with UNESCO funds to disintegrate via a MOAB dropped from 13,000 feet in the air. You need chaos. You need destruction. Because your department is running a deficit. You have loans to pay off. Your mom is in the hospital, refusing to get vaccinated despite the features pieces you wrote that were sure to convince on-the-fence folks to get the jab. Her medicare doesn’t cover everything. You were asked to step in. You need dead kids to help stop your mom from dying.

Last you checked people don’t obsessively check the app on their phone to see the latest openings of bakeries in Brooklyn. You need the dead kids. And you need them now.

Pick up the glass. Drain it. Throw it at the TV. Bury your head in shame. Look what you did. Clean up this mess.