behold! you did not save democracy
remembering when being a journalist was enough
“Behold, I did not save democracy,” you speak one evening to your poor waiter, who just asked you if you wanted syrup with your waffle, but now is your captive audience, because you’re just so tired of wandering around town on a Friday night, wishing you could smoke cigarettes to at least make your misery look designer-level, but instead, you settled for jumping into the nearest diner with Midwestern upholstery.
It’s somewhere between Bushwick and Bedstuy, and it’s 3am, and you just took K at some concert with indie rock music that whisked you back to a simpler time in your early 20’s. You wandered out of the concert to go find what you suddenly realized you’d not stopped losing. You wandered into this place to find a good waffle.
The K wasn’t enough to make you remember with any clarity what you were like when you sought glory, but it was just enough to make the memory stagnate inside your mind’s eye like a stye you can’t unsee.
You gaze at the past you, the you that sat up straight with glee in that brightly lit hall while Mr. V — whatever his last name is you can’t remember now, only that he wore wire-rimmed glasses, smiled without his eyes, and could drone on and on about the history of some newspaper that was now defunct — as she took notes on how to craft a good lede, how to gather the right facts, how to interview well, how to write like the mighty.
You see her as she bumbles across campus into the student newspaper, where she becomes the most prolific Maneater freshman reporter who writes up research, quotes, compelling characters, all while trying to keep up her grades.
“Wow, you’re quite… productive,” her male competitors say one evening at the annual Hoochfest. “You’re trying to be Woodward and Bernstein?”
She doesn’t know who she wants to be, she just knows she wants to change the world. She wants to keep governments accountable, raise the public awareness, let everyone be grateful that they can learn about the things they must –
You follow her as she skips down the lane into junior year, when she runs up to her favorite curly-haired professor, exclaiming that she got the internship at the Indianapolis Star, even though it’d be incomparable to that summer covering small towns in the least traveled state in the Union.
You recall the memories of driving around North Dakota to the sounds of Mumford and Sons and with the cool 50 degree summer air wafting through your car window, the freshness of untainted territory drifting in and out of your consciousness.
The last time you spent consecutive weeks in diners, you were sitting with old men recalling the good old days before their streets were about to lose their charters, before the children left to go to bigger places, before they needed someone like that rich narcissist to give them the policies they’d need to keep the farms —
And then that image fades into her with a different hair style but trembling with glee at getting the internship as a state correspondent during that fateful semester in Washington, D.C. where —
Where you realize,
Fuck,
this is an illusion and —
And all the interviews, all the stories that the community needs, all the motivation of the last time in your life you were deeply of the conviction that you would serve a purpose in society —
It all comes crashing down when the jig is up.
When you start slowing down a bit and notice that this is not enough. This dream you built up so much, that everyone had collectively bought into — it’s not enough. It tastes good for a second, and then stale.
Like the waffle you’re eating in 2022. You bite into the fluffy caramelized bread, and you chew slowly, and you try really hard to ignore how it’s not the best waffle you ever had, because its texture just is a bit off, and it’s a bit burnt on the edges, and now you can’t remember why you wanted waffle so bad because this one just isn’t doing it, because it’s just not as good as the ones you used to have in Columbia, Mo., and soon you’re fucking crying because why isn’t this waffle ok? Why is it not enough?
You did the “right thing.” You did what you were supposed to. You had a desire, you went after it. You looked around until you found an avenue to satisfy your craving, your need for satisfaction. And then you notice that it didn’t hit the spot but you spent money, a lot of money, and a lot of heart on this, and why isn’t this enough anymore? Why can’t this change now?
Why can’t this take you back, to the days when these were the only thing you’d crave after a night singing at the top of your lungs at Penguin Piano Bar, when mediocre keyboard covers of Mr. Brightside filled your ears, the smell of white person sweat emanated off all your classmates, and yet there was literally no place else you’d rather be because you’d never been so happy in college, among people that believed in whatever you did too?
People aren’t like that now. Everyone’s fighting on the Internet, everyone’s fighting on the streets of New York, and you just want this waffle to taste good. It doesn’t taste bad, but you just can’t recreate what it was like when you had any semblance of status that was good enough, when you were so high off a dream that you didn’t need to eat and sleep, because you had so much potential and that was enough.
You worked for 5 years, typing out thousands of words per week, never complaining, always so eager, always complimented by every editor you met, always able to fall asleep with a smile on your face even if you were also shaking from the pressure of living up to your own inner child’s expectations.
You went to school to be the most practical version of an artist. An artist of words. An artist of people.
Before you got underpaid, before you saw that all your hard work wouldn’t take your anywhere but from city to city, job to job, starting over one place to starting over another,
Before you realized how no one in the journalism industry graduated into a life that felt balanced,
Before you saw that your writing wouldn’t make you happier or help you sleep at night at the promise of glory,
Before you saw that most days, you wouldn’t save democracy, because you could barely, barely save you —
You start resenting that you didn’t know sooner, that you’d change your mind.
You start resenting your classmates, who you dearly loved, who made it hard to leave and lose a sense of connection with.
You start resenting society for changing so much that now these savers of democracy are reviled by the public, thanks to that narcissist that those folk in North Dakota didn’t really want to vote for, especially after you gently and cheerily listened to them and changed their minds about liberals, but boohoo, no one cares about it because they did anyway, and you started losing your hard on for consequentiality real fast after that year’s election…
Your life now is pretty rad. You’ve healed much, much, childhood trauma. You run your own business. You have the best friends and boyfriend. You literally have the wind at your back, social power at your fingertips. Your life played out like a story. You have Missouri to thank for that, sure.
But back then, your life felt epic, grandiose, and visibly so to others because it had also not been lived in yet. And you prioritized being a “legend” more than being a person.
You could make people’s jaws drop with the things you could uncover, from corrupt payday loan lenders to illegal child trafficking to racism in the yoga world to political officials sexually harassing young women. Your pen was mightier than your sword. You could show, not tell.
Now all you do is tell. Now all you can do is try to wave that waiter over, because part of you wants to manufacture a good story to tell your friends, to try to be entertaining.
Part of you also wants him to listen, and be like, “gee, that was a good run you had there of journalism.”
Part of you wants him to read the last story you wrote that you were proud of before you were unceremoniously booted from your first full time job, and had to make a choice between leaving the only place you’d felt home in after college, or try to bounce around again in the hopes of kickstarting your career someplace else. So what if it’s about a dog and a flower shop? It was yours, all yours.
Part of you wants him to know you still wake up at night feeling an ache in your chest you know is from the grief you can’t quite shake, the lost identity you still feel like a gaping wound in your chest. So what if it was the best thing to do? It still hurt like hell.
Part of you wants to tell him,
"I wanted badly, badly to be a hero. I wanted the glory of being the good guy after a lifetime of being told I was bad. I thought only journalism could make me a hero.
Now, my life is a testament to what I tell myself daily: that the world shouldn't need heroes bc society should be equipped as a collective to save everyone itself.
For my child self, being an ordinary citizen of the world is the radicalest thing I could have ever chosen.
Instead of saving democracy, I guess I just saved myself.”
And the last part of you wants him to know that, well, you are so happy with this choice. You are happy you have the best friends, and the best job now, and the best city embraces you, and you did move on. Sort of.
The waiter doesn’t really want to hear any of this. He wants you to pay and get out because they close at 4am.
You tell him that waffle was ok, and you’ll be back next time.
Except you don’t remember the name of this diner.
But it’s okay. You can lie now, because behold, you don’t need to always “tell the truth and be objective” anymore.
You didn’t save democracy, after all.