This will not be your cliché of a column that proclaims, “Here are my New Year’s resolutions.” Nobody wants that today, it’s holiday time. Nope, instead, it’s a column that declares, “Here are what your New Year’s resolutions ought to be.” Sorry.
Let’s start with the Internet — and the garbage it spreads like a virus. If you see something political online that makes sense to you and you want to enlighten the rest of us, first press your personal “pause” button. Then check it out. See if it’s legitimate — meaning true. If it’s not, show some integrity and don’t further disseminate the distortion. Remember, if something smells fishy, there’s probably some fetid fish inside.
Now, driving. I’d guess that most of us have lots of pet peeves about driving (usually someone else’s, of course). A single column is too short for all my peeves, so here’s just one: get off my tail. If memory serves, you were taught way-back-when that when you’re behind me, you should leave a full car length for every 10 miles per hour we’re traveling. For the math-challenged, that means six car lengths at 60 mph. If you can’t respect that easy equation and I have to hit my brakes, you could end up in my trunk. If you really want to get in my trunk, can’t you just ask politely?
And speaking of the road, if you’re in law enforcement, here’s a polite plea: when you stop lawbreakers by the side of the road, would you please pull them as far over as possible please so that you don’t cause a second problem please while you’re preventing the first one … please? While we’re on the subject, how about those blindingly bright strobe lights? If they make it harder for oncoming cars to see the road, they’re hardly making it safer.
Oh yes, one more resolution before we leave the street: Drivers, please be smart. If a bicyclist is stupid enough to be blocking your path, would it kill you to slow down for a few seconds? It might kill the bicyclist if you don’t. And bicyclists, a resolution for you, too: Don’t be stupid.
Now, politics. May your New Year’s resolution not be to vote for Donald Trump, or Hillary Clinton, or anyone else; you’ll do that anyway. No, may it simply be that once all votes are cast in 2016, you go to the trouble of taking down whatever yard signs you went to the trouble of putting up.
We also need some New Year’s resolutions in my own business of journalism. Too many to fit in this space. But here is a handful. First of all, “credit” is a good thing, as in, “John Elway deserves credit for the Broncos’ success.” But when a terrorist group says it carried out an attack, we shouldn’t say, “The Islamic State claimed credit for (fill in the blank).” Anyone who went to journalism school should know this; we say something more like, “They claimed responsibility.” I’ve seen the unprofessional version used everywhere from The Associated Press to The New York Times, and have heard it on network television newscasts, too.
Another resolution I wish we’d see, from journalists, prosecutors, police and others: in cases where criminal suspects are killed, we’re perfectly willing to declare them demonstrably (rather than “allegedly”) guilty of crimes we know they committed (for example, shooters in places like Newtown and San Bernardino). So why, when they’re caught alive but their guilt seems equally incontestable, can’t we do the same (think James Holmes in Aurora, Robert Dear Jr. in Colorado Springs)?
Finally in the new year, can our beloved but chronically bedraggled Colorado Rockies baseball team, looking at its 24th year here, finally figure things out? I don’t really know what that means but the problem is, neither do they.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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