As I sit here in my home relaxing after a very nice brunch with Veronica, I can’t help but think about history. Not just any history but the history of my former nation the United States of America and how it has been intertwined with the history of this newspaper. In just sixty-one days The Dis Brimstone-Daily Pitchfork will celebrate its tenth anniversary as a progressive and hard hitting news blog. Our very first story in late August 2005 was about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Cavalor Epthith [q c p n!] made it clear after the first week that this blog was a work in progress and that our mission was not to change the minds of people but to “simply make them think.”
Well, people are thinking, some of them hopefully many of the more than a million that have read these pages, are. Cavalor after the first year said he was willing to keep the digital version of the paper alive for five Terran years and in that last few months before the fifth anniversary he would review our efforts and decide if it should continue for another five years. After the election of President Barack Obama and all the reporting the staff had done on the failure of the Iraq War there was a feeling of certainty that the plug would not be pulled.
On 29 August 2010 Cavalor said, “We simply cannot stop now just when things are getting interesting.” Oh, how much more interesting things have gotten since that day. This month has seen tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina as nine black Christians were murdered by a white supremacist terrorist and triumph as the United States’ Supreme Court upheld Obamacare and decided that same sex couples have marriage rights in all fifty states of the Union. Despite conservative warnings that the nation would tear itself apart if either of these decisions came to pass it is business as usual from Washington to Los Angeles on this fine morning.
So as is in my nature I’ve taken my victory lap over these two decisions, said a quiet prayer to the Fates on behalf of the grieving families of the victims in Charleston and gone back to the work that I am tasked to do here– looking for threads in the reports of news from all over Terra. There is still much work to do and Cavalor knows this best of all. Just yesterday he brought the staff in for a meeting about what we will be doing here digitally for the 2016 election. “So we’re not shutting up shop in late August?” I asked smiling. “Not a chance,” he said, “things are just getting interesting.”
More impressions from the staff on five more years of The Dis Brimstone-Daily Pitchfork follow over the rest of your week end.
Qu’ul cuda praedex nihil!
Diane Valencen, D.S.V.J., CS, O.Q.H [Journ.], ArF J., M.F.
Editorial Page Editor
The Dis Brimstone Daily Pitchfork
54 Hov’ish 3 AS