Opinion

The retirement of a columnist

Today I will leave this world. It’s not easy to say that. In some ways, it’s a relief. I’ve heard that retirement can be relaxing, with no more worries about the problems of the world, no more frustration and stress, no more critics. Of course, most of those people were leaving their work to play shuffleboard and wear sweaters in 80-degree weather in Florida, not heading for three years of sitting in law-school classrooms in Iowa.I’m not really retiring because I want to. For me, it is more of a forced retirement, like walking the plank with the sharp swords of bankers, academic advisers and adulthood prodding me forward. “Keep walkin’,” they snarl, “your time is up.”

Today I leave the world of 3 a.m. deadlines and 700-word weekly manifestos.

After three years and almost 100 columns, I am jumping off the Badger Herald and into the waters of post-journalism life. I imagine some will greet this jump with cheers, and I understand. This world has been good to me — not always to readers. The unique thing about college journalism is that columnists have very few loyal readers, a fact that is sometimes disheartening but ultimately liberating. It allows a lot of freedom to experiment, to take chances, to be critical of one side of the political spectrum one week and another side the next.

Those who do this for a living must be careful about alienating their loyalists; in our world, these limitations are lower, more easily traversed. But this freedom would not matter if there was nothing to write about. Luckily for me, our generation lives in an awfully exciting time; in 100 or even 500 years, I’m confident historians will look back upon it as a turning point in our history.

In the past three years, we’ve lived through a presidential election that was not decided until December, a Congressman under suspicion in the death of an intern, the most devastating terrorist attacks in American history, two wars, drastic changes in the law, and waves of protest directed at everything from globalization to the military to the Dixie Chicks. We even survived Britney Spears and “Joe Millionaire.”

Given this fertile ground for editorializing, I never really had to work at all — lucky for me, because I’m no creative writer. The events of the last three years laid it all out there for me. Story ideas grew on trees. I picked these fruits for myself, but I like to think I served some greater cause in indulging in them. I got that feeling every time someone offered feedback, wrote a letter or e-mail or made a phone call critical of what I wrote — after all, that’s the professed purpose of this newspaper (and this university, for that matter). And, hey, pats on the back didn’t hurt either, nor did seeing people reading the opinion page in the back rows of lecture halls and nodding, giggling or shaking their heads in disgust.

I cannot lie and say I was above it all. There were times when I would get angry at criticism, get frustrated or, the worst feeling of all, second-guess what I had written. In retrospect, I should have realized the whole time that it comes with the territory: when you put a lot of emotion into what you do, a lot of emotion comes back. It can’t all be happy feelings. But I would not have traded those emotions for anything — at the very least, they were a reminder that I was alive. After today, they will be dead.

Perhaps they can be reincarnated as a lawyer or a legislator. Perhaps one day I’ll write again and they’ll all come back. But as I pen this note and ponder my reincarnation, I cannot help but get the sinking feeling that this will be the best “life” I ever had.

 

Matt Lynch (mlynch@badgerherald.com) is a senior majoring in English and political science. He would like to thank the Badger Herald for giving him the opportunity to ramble for the last three years, especially Julie Bosman and Chris Tennant (for giving him a shot at writing columns in the first place), Jenny Thalheimer (for hiring him as a features writer way back in the fall of ‘99), and all of his opinion editors over the years — Heather Silverberg, Hasdai Westbrook, Ethan Rouen, Kristin Wieben, A.J. Hughes and Eric Cullen — for letting him stay on and not tinkering too much, if only to save his feelings.