Rex Smith

Many years ago I was the editor of a tiny daily newspaper in Indiana, in the heart of the Farm Belt. I had uncles and cousins nearby who raised corn and soybeans in soil made fertile by millions of years of glacial movement that left rich nutrient deposits.

If you look at what’s on the shelves at airport bookstores, you figure most folks pick travel reading material that gives their mind a getaway, too. I wish I could be that person. But I inevitably find myself picking out something that I figure will help me catch up with what I should have learned a long time ago. Time away is a perfect opportunity for self-betterment, right?

Scientists have long known that there’s a link between heredity and personality – that who we are is in part influenced by who came before us. That doesn’t give you an excuse for, say, being a jerk just because your great-grandpa was. But certain personality traits are affected by our DNA.

Today I’d like to say just a few words about words that are not said – ways that we’re encouraged to avoid truth-telling.

You know those photos that show a younger Donald Trump hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein and some underage girls – one of them showing Trump with his hand on a young girl’s leg? Have you seen those? Yeah, well, they’re not real, folks.

In recent weeks, I have used this golden opportunity to offer commentary on a valued regional public radio network mainly to talk about journalism. I’m comfortable with that because it has been my professional focus for a half-century.

There’s a reference book called the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs, which is how I know that it was some five-and-a-half centuries ago that a book first declared, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” Actually, in that 1576 book, Petit Palace, attributed to someone named G. Pettie, the phrasing was, “So long as I knoweth it not, it hurteth me not.”

Ever since Donald Trump became a political force a decade ago, we’ve been told that his popularity is in part a result of grievance – that is, a lot of people become part of the MAGA faithful because they believe that the political system and American institutions are stacked against them.

We sometimes think that no time before was as perilous or troubled as our time. Probably that’s not true.

The other day I was talking with a guy who said that because he loved hockey he had put in almost 30 years as a referee for youth and adult amateur hockey games. But he gave it up recently, he said, because he couldn’t take the abuse: the people, especially parents, who would attack him verbally, even threaten him physically, because they didn’t like his calls.