![]() You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to hen I first began to write The Fish Ladder, it was because of a hard-to-describe feeling that I should be travelling upstream, and also that I should be documenting the journey. If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. Sparkman.Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: It often takes three to four days of steady rain for any run-off to build in county creeks and streams, according to Mr. The district has said that they are reluctant to release a lot of water into the river because, with regional groundwater so low, the dry soil would soak it up and the water would be gone within a month. “We’ve been dealing with drybacks on that river and pretty much every creek in the county for about a year and a half.” The river has been dry “for quite a while now,” says Marty Grimes, a spokesman for the water district. “So a lot of people are shocked to see these creeks dry and fish dying, but it’s part of a natural cycle… We just have to accommodate it.” “A lot of the public have got used to seeing these systems running 365 days a year,” says Jerry Sparkman, a water resources supervisor with the Santa Clara Valley Water District. Two years ago, the river was a thriving habitat for local wildlife, including ducks and beavers. Today, Uvalde will be honoring them, and as the town journeys toward calmer waters, it will never forget them.Ī river no longer runs through San Jose, thanks to the ongoing severe drought in California.Įight miles of the 14-mile Guadalupe River, which runs through the city in Santa Clara County, Calif., is now bone-dry, filled with nothing but weeds, rocks, trash, and dead fish. ![]() Maite Rodriguez will never study marine biology.Today, I’m thinking of those 19 children and two teachers. Eva Mireles will never go on another hike. Rojelio Torres will never catch another football. Tess Mata will never throw another softball. Today is as much about them as anything, and anyone, else. Here I want to devote a few words to those who are no longer here. It looks at the aftermath, at the past year, at the living. The town has been grieving, and it has been tense and divided.Our story today will describe that in more detail. One fewer journalist in Uvalde today is no bad thing, we thought. It’s one reason the Monitor chose last week to visit. Pedestrians glanced at the memorial as they continued about their day.“Everyone is walking on eggshells,” one local told me last week. Twenty-one white crosses surround the fountain downtown, decorated with stuffed animals and superhero action figures that filled my eyes with tears. Twenty-one white crosses are staked in front of a “Welcome to Uvalde” sign. The town I visited last week was quiet, but eerie. Now make it unexpected, add a global media frenzy and a heavy dose of politics, and multiply it by a population of 15,000, and you can begin to imagine what the last 12 months have been like in Uvalde.The town was shellshocked when I visited a year ago. It has been a difficult, surreal year for a town that, like so many others, never thought it would be anything other than a quiet, anonymous town. Grief is a journey – and a long, complicated one at that.Uvalde, Texas, will never be the same after the horrific shooting at Robb Elementary School last May.
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