Today's Opinions

A half century ago in rural Pennsylvania, a woman named Clem spent her mornings immersed in the pungent smell of chlorine and the ornery noise of youngsters wakened too early.

Part drill instructor and part den mother, Clem preached water safety with the fervor of a country minister, and over the years she taught thousands of young charges how to swim. For the older students, the ones earning their lifeguard certification, this also meant a course in cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

In the 1980s, futurist John Naisbitt coined the term “high tech/high touch.”

“The more technology we introduce into society,” he wrote, “the more people will aggregate, will want to be with other people.”

While some predicted technologies such as home entertainment would mark the end of the movie theater, Naisbitt astutely observed that people don’t go to theaters to see movies per se; we go there to see movies with other people.

As journalists, the stories we tell are often referred to as the first draft of history. Others have said that we put the headlines on history as it happens.

As an editor over the past 37 years, I have written somewhere around 150,000 headlines — a few clever, others disturbing, some so heartbreaking that they live still in my nightmares.