Changing Doubts

I’ve hated change from way back. I’ve hated it more than most people – heck, I’m made to hate change. Bred to hate it.

Twenty-four years in journalism means 24 years of skepticism; the good, old-fashioned skepticism that would be called cynicism if it were happening in anyone else but me.

Tell me that it’s time to change something, and I’m going to ask you “what’s wrong with what we’ve got now?”

Because that’s what I’ve been built to do.

Journalists are the hardest nuts in any media business – offer them a sandwich, and they’re likely to look at you and say, “I bet you don’t have any I like.”

That’s why journalists are journalists – because no pat answer is safe.

But it’s actually death to a business, and a bunch of other things, too, because doubt doesn’t grow anything. Even if it’s healthy doubt – even if it’s the necessary doubt that keeps politicians from driving themselves and their voters into astounding, cataclysmic pitfalls.

I was one of the few reporters in Newfoundland and Labrador who asked questions when former premier Brian Peckford decided this province could be the world leader in hydroponic English cucumbers – 23 million in taxpayers’ dollars, and everyone knew it had been a mistake.

I’ve doubted conventional knowledge on the health of fish stocks, on the promised safety of oil projects, the sanctity of sex-abusing clergy and even – near sacrilege of a different kind in this eastern province right now – the perfection of Premier Danny Williams.

I’ve doubted lots – but it’s funny how the things you do for a living have a way of intruding on the way you live your life. Risk-takers, especially those wonderful venture capitalists whose near-business-death experiences are so fun to watch, tend to be wild risk-takers in their private lives.

Glad-handing, gregarious politicians take their glad-hands other places, too.

And those who doubt professionally, well, they tend to bring that doubt home with them.

Show me a new computer system, and I’ll doubt that it will work as well as the one I’m used to now. Tell me the public wants a different kind of journalism than the one I’ve always provided, and I’ll probably nod my head and doggedly keep on trying to hand in the old kind anyway.

Because there’s safety in the same – safety in the same systems, the same politicians, the same old people that you’re used to. Maybe that’s why we so often vote for the candidate that the latest popular party offers up to us – and why, for the canny politician, the nomination fight is often every bit as difficult as the election.

Intellectually, I know that there’s huge value sometimes in the new. Change is work – that’s why it’s so hard. But often, it’s worth it – and more than you know when you start.

It’s strange to have such an inbred aversion to something as simple as wholeheartedly just going for it – and just once, I’d love to jump without ever examining just where it was I was going to land.

I know the great rewards in something as simple as heading for a river where no one I know has fished, and where there’s no sign on the water of any other fisherman whatsoever. I know the magic of new pools and fresh falls, and unspooling into water that looks like it has never seen a cast.
But show me a political risk, or a financial one, and I will find a million doubts to counterbalance any short call or long shot.

I’ve been the brakes on bad ideas for almost a quarter-century now – but sometimes, I’d just love to let the train run free, and simply hang on for the ride.

All aboard. It’s time for a change.