Jeff Whitten

Columnist

With apologies beforehand, consider this an exclusive and no-holds-barred glimpse into the high stakes, glamorous and exciting world of being a former hack weekly newspaper editor.

Even better, it’s written by me, a former hack now mostly retired and wishing a hairy pox on developers and people from up north who move down here in vast hordes and immediately think they own the place.

Well, maybe I’m not really wishing for a pox on the transplants: I don’t blame them for fleeing Ohio or some other misbegotten hole in the mud and rust up there. Besides, I don’t even know what wishing a hairy pox would entail, exactly, and I’m too lazy to Google it and find out.

I do however wish the developers would just cut it out and find some honest way to earn a buck that didn’t go around stomping all over the place and turning perfectly good nature into gardens that grow people. Do that mess somewhere else.

Either that, or I wish turnabout would be fair play and developers wake up en masse one morning soon to find a Super Walmart, a Super Kroger, a 7,000-home subdivision complete with its own St. Joseph’s Candler Primary Care and Convenience Store, a Dollar General, a Parker’s, an EnMarket, and a Hooters full of liquored up 22-year-old Clemson fans driving pickups with loud mufflers that make weird whistling sounds had suddenly moved next door overnight and were throwing a party.

Further, I could happily support an afterlife where, when developers get to where they’re going for eternity, they and their henchmen find themselves forever with full bladders and stuck behind the wheels of their Range Rovers in the middle lane of I-95 about 100 yards from the Highway 144 exit, never getting any closer to a restroom because of gridlock. It would serve them right.

But that’s not what this dumb column is about. This dumb column is about what to do when you’ve accomplished your job and are catching your breath and getting ready for the next obstacle. It’s downtime, basically, which is really a great time for napping or hiding from people you don’t want to see.

I did that a lot more than I probably should have, back in my working life. I did it mostly by leaving early the day the paper came out. After putting in close to 40 hours in three days and probably already having worked the previous weekend, I’d go home mid-afternoon on the fourth, grab a cold beer and look at stuff in the yard I needed to do first chance I got and hope the phone didn’t ring with someone telling me Richmond Hill City Council and the Bryan County Commission were trying to annex each other.

As for people to hide from, I am thinking in this case mostly of scary, angry middle-aged women who appear to be becoming prone to nutting up for no good reason. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene comes to mind here, but she’s not the only one. Indeed, I ran across more than a few in my time in newspapering, and I’m very much afraid to name them lest they find out where I live and come to my house and beat me up in my front yard in front of my neighbors.

What’s more, I’m cognizant that many among the local business jet set might consider that a public service and give them a medal, because such are the times we live in. And to be fair, maybe I do deserve a good whupping. In fact, I probably do.

Even so, there’s no doubt about this: Meanness is in.

Should you doubt it, look at the woman who lectures the press for the president and the way she goes about it. That woman is often exasperated with having to answer questions, and makes no bones about what she thinks about Democrats or, by extension, the so-called mainstream media. To hear her they’re clearly a disloyal and unpatriotic bunch who have some nerve even showing up to ask questions – so if I heard she was headed my way for a talk I’d load up and go fishing somewhere on the other side of the county and hope she found some other poor soul to belittle. I’d hate to be her husband.

But where, I keep wondering now that the side which professes its attachment to and faith in the Man Upstairs is back as top dog in what passes for our Republic, does it say in the Bible we ought to be so mean and petty to everybody we don’t like? I’m rereading the Bible to see if I can pin it down.

And where is this mandate to behave as bullies of the world, exactly?

The current president got 77,284,118 votes, which tallies 49.8 percent of the vote. His opponent got 74,999,166 million, or 48.3 percent of the vote. Only 63.9 percent of eligible voters bothered to vote for one or the other. And yet a 1.5 percent difference in the popular vote is somehow being touted as proof to the administration we all endorse what’s happening now, whatever it is — and it can be hard to figure out.

What the numbers tell me is the current president didn’t manage to get half the vote from those who went to the polls, hardly a landslide, yet I read he’s claiming he received around 80 million votes. That comes as no surprise, given his apparent zest for inflating the value of his real estate to get loans. In that sort of universe it’s whatever people will buy, or swallow, or are willing to pay.

Ah, never mind. It’s easy these days to wonder what the heck happened to a country started by immigrants – immigrants who ripped off the Indians, but immigrants nonetheless—to make us feel so superior to the rest of the world, and so let down by them, and so convinced they’re ripping us off every chance they get.

“Give us your poor huddled masses” has become “give us your money and we’ll give you a golden visa.” Which means former Pooler mayor and current U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter is right: this is the new golden age.

And I digress. This is about downtime.

Many professionals – bankers and lawyers and such -- enjoy downtime and were taught in college that it’s important to keep an even keel and have some me time as one recovers from the day-to-day business of doing somebody else out of their hard-earned money.

The key here is to realize the best thing one can do is try to maintain some equanimity and realize life isn’t all about results. If it was, we’d all be like Ebenezer Scrooge – and when’s the last time you saw a U-Haul trailer hooked up to the back of a hearse on the way to a funeral? I read that the other day, and it made a lot of sense.

You can’t take it with you and you are going to die, whether you want to or not.

I.e, he who dies with the most toys doesn’t win. He’s just a selfish prat.

In the Army, back when I was a lowly Spec 4 in the field artillery, down time was a good time to practice the old rule of never volunteering for anything and here I remember something an NCO told me during a 12-mile forced road march in 90-degree weather and 200 percent humidity.

This after I was dumb enough to volunteer to be a road guard and then spent the night before enjoying the health benefit of imbibing many delicious cans of ice-cold Busch Light with my compatriots, including some who went belly dancing for beads on River Street during St. Patrick’s Day. I don’t know if they do that now, this was in the days before it got so big and taken over by the corporations.

For those who do not know, in my day being a road guard in a formation – PT or road march or whatever – meant you had to run around stopping traffic on side streets while the rest of the troops trickled through, then get back into formation, then do it all over again.

All that extra running was a workout, especially if you have short legs like me. They’re pretty good looking legs, if I do say so myself and I do, but they are short.

“Whitten, you big dummy,” said the NCO, when we took a break somewhere about six miles in and some of us collapsed under a shade tree on Fort Stewart’s back 40 and sweated beer and tried not to die.

“How long have you been in the Army?” he asked. “Five years, almost six? You should know the rules by now. Never volunteer. You volunteered once when you joined up and look where that got you, you big dummy. Don’t do it again.”

That led to a philosophical discussion that has, I’m happy to say, stuck with me since.

In short, the upshot that day was a consensus as a soldier you should never run when you can walk, never walk when you can stand still, never stand still when you can sit down, never sit down when you can lay down and never stay awake when you can sleep, because, truth be told, there are plenty of times when you won’t have a choice.

Words to live by, I think. Life’s too short, so find you some downtime.

Now retired, Jeff Whitten is a former editor of the Bryan County News.