How the Butterfly Effect pulled me from a rabbit hole

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

Rumination is ruination when it is past-centered.

When you go through the parade of indignities that is the modern newspaper business — Captain-Ahab-ing the churning and wave-whipping seas of media changes — you can flood your mind with nostalgia and regret and dive into a bottomless second-guessing.

Fully three books include a chronicling of our final years of ownership of The Carroll Daily Times Herald — New York Times reporter David Enrich's recently released "Murder The Truth" and former Chicago Sun-Times reporter Dave Hoekstra's "Beacons In The Darkness."

The talented Beth Macy, who wrote "Dopesick," the book adapted into the Hulu Series with Michael Keaton, this fall has a must-read: "Paper Girl: A Memoir Of Home And Family In a Fractured America." Macy talked with me for the book about rural America and the state of community newspapers. I'll likely be interviewing Macy on stage at a Midwest book event in the fall.

There are bigger issues with my newspaper career than just the loss of a family business, an identity — concerns like democracy, truth itself and community connectedness.

Here's part of what I told Hoekstra:

"People just don’t see community like they used to. They live in narcissism pods. Place doesn’t matter like it used to. Place used to be essential to identity. Now people have an online avatar that’s almost more important to them than where their physical being is. So if you’re in this narcissism pod where you have your Facebook friends, your Netflix queue, and your Amazon wish list, what the fuck does it matter whether you live in Carroll, Iowa, or Dubuque, Iowa? ... Iowa is losing a lot of its character because of it. And that comes down to our business because people don’t feel the same way about community things thanks to fucking Mark Zuckerberg.”

I remain in the fight for local journalism because that's how we build democracy and community — with news that people can actually see, that is outside the national tribalism with its prescribed virtue signaling on the left and white-washing on the right.

There are many ways to channel energies in pursuit of truth.

There is this publication, The Iowa Mercury.

I'm active in the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation. There are newspapers alive and printing today because of it. They can tell their own stories, announce connections to it.

Then there is the Ames Voice, a non-profit news site nearing launch with a mission of being a major local news provider in the region that is home to Iowa State University.

In all of this, I daily think about our family's newspaper. It remains painful. Jumping in and assisting in other people's projects helps. A lot.

One of the works of fiction that most influences me is Melville's "Moby Dick." I've read it three times. Ahab was less obsessed and more balanced in his pursuit than me.

So, yes, I ruminate about the news business globally, and specifically, right here, in my community, my family.

And I can spiral at times.

But then I think of the Butterfly Effect — how any small change, the whisper of winds generated from a butterfly wing flap across the globe, can change outcomes thousands of miles away.

So when I am rabbit-holed in the past, fighting demons and discontents, dreams dashed, untaken roads that I blindly assume would have exited to more promising days, I have to think, wait, I'm still alive. That's something. Any other decisions might mean I wouldn't be here.

For example, when I turned 50 in 2019 I'd planned to take a long trip with a friend to England and France, but I cancelled the journey so the time and money could go toward keep the newspaper alive.

Let's say I'd made that trip, that times had been better. I turned 50 right as COVID started. Perhaps I would have gotten COVID early on -- and died. As it stands, I withstood the first years of the pandemic and only dealt with a moderate bout in 2023.

Maybe I would have been other places, doing other things, that would have ended badly.

I've been to two funerals recently for men who died at age 50 and 55. I'm still here. It is a gift.

In his exceptional book of poetry "Look, Black Boy" my friend Caleb Rainey, who performs under the name "The Negro Artist," ends the collection — and Nik Heftman's documentary film — with inspired words that are perspective defining and saving grace for me.

"As long as you are here, you hold the capacity for change, like tomorrow ... You are alive."

LIVE BROADCAST SUNDAY

The Iowa Mercury and The Seven Times will go LIVE at 11 a.m. Sunday, May 4, for an in-depth discussion about the critically acclaimed film "Sinners." Joining Nik Heftman and Douglas Burns will be Dana James, owner and editor of Black Iowa News and author/historian Rachelle Chase who publishes the Reading With Rachelle Substack column and podcast of the same name.

About The Iowa Mercury

(Douglas Burns, founder of The Iowa Mercury and a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read dozens of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers' Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. )