I care so much. Why don’t you?

I care so deeply about everything. Sometimes, I wish everyone felt this way too. 

I was always told to grow out of this, but I’m learning to love this about myself.

I care about how I’m perceived by others. I care about sounding smart. I care about getting everything right. When I’m passionate about something, it occupies an unimaginable amount of space in my brain. I sleep it over, question it, talk about it and think about it…a lot. 

This is how I’ve always been, and sometimes, I love it. It makes me feel confident, like it’s smart to be passionate about something. 

This week, and most of my time recently, that ‘something’ was journalism. 

This is what I cared about yesterday:

I came home from the newsroom and started unpacking my thoughts to my roommates before I even made it through the door, per usual. 

I love the newsroom. Our passion to feed a starving industry brings us closer together. Humanity has spent hundreds of years trying to prevent this exact kind of disappearance. 

Way before the first newspaper hit someone’s doorstep, we were carving laws into stone and finding ways to make words outlive their writers. 

We spent centuries figuring out how to make information travel further than those who created it, and then came the printing press. Gutenberg’s press made words reproducible on a scale greater than we could’ve ever imagined at the time. 

Eventually, newspapers turned that technology into an immediate daily record of a community. 

The Brown and White is part of the memory of both Lehigh and the South Side community surrounding it. Without us, the South Side would be a news desert. 

We’ve become very good at preserving information, and even better at distributing it.

A phone can put endless sources into someone’s pocket and the internet sends stories across the world at record speeds. There is more information available to us than there was at any other point in human history.

People have stopped caring about whose job it is to find the truth and distribute it. 

Without journalists, news consumption would simulate a game of telephone. Information would be everywhere, but the truth would be almost nowhere. Eventually, people would stop asking.

Journalism simply would become underfunded and underappreciated. When journalists are passionate, we can’t be ignored. 

Once I started caring, I couldn’t stop. 

This is what I care about today:

Journalism has always made sense to me because I’ve always wanted answers.  

My brain is wired to fight uncertainty and to search for explanations, patterns and reasons because it’s reassuring to believe that we can make sense of the world around us.

But, the question of who’s responsible for finding, verifying and delivering that information has become more important. 

Journalists promise the pursuit of certainty. 

Every time I enter The Brown and White’s newsroom, I enter a room where people have made a commitment to being curious on behalf of others. We read the documents nobody else opens, listen to the community, call the people nobody thought to call and ask the uncomfortable questions.

This is what makes the loss of local journalism so unsettling. Bethlehem will keep changing whether anyone writes about it or not. 

People will organize, protest, build, leave and celebrate.

To be a good person is not to know everything — it’s caring enough to know something. It means sharing access to truth. It means paying attention to the institutions who have power over your life. It means reading beyond the headline. It means both questioning and protecting your community.

This is what I will care about tomorrow:

If newspapers disappeared, there wouldn’t just be one morning that every press stopped printing. No dramatic headline would announce that it’d be the last. Because no one would be there to report it.

The papers would become thinner, occasional and digital, until one press night becomes the last set of pages. 

I still want answers, seek reasoning and wish the world came with clearer meaning. 

Journalism has taught me something that my instinct for certainty never could: sometimes we cannot control what happens, but we can make sure it doesn’t  go unnoticed.

We are trained to ask, investigate and document the truth — the purpose of journalism. 

Not simply to tell the community what happened today, but to make sure tomorrow can’t convince us that it never happened. 

We’ve become extraordinarily good at making information impossible to contain. But information is not the same as knowledge, nor is knowledge the same as understanding. 

Someone still has to look, ask and care enough to find out for others. Otherwise, life will go on as a telephone game.

And eventually, someone will look at the world they inherited and ask the only question that matters: “What happened?”

And nobody will know. 

Great things can happen when we care too much.