Who do you think made the suburbs better this year?
Memory Lane. When you travel the course of any year, you can't avoid ending up here. It's the place where, while taking stock of your life and preparing for a new year ahead, you look back on the events just past. It's the place where, to recall Santayana's famous phrase, you remember the past as a means of controlling what it is you may have to relive.
It's also a place that helps fill newspapers, Web space and broadcast time during that numbingly slow news period from the Ides to the end of December. Thankfully, our need for content coincides with most people's need for a not-too-demanding review of the highlight reel of the last 12 months.
Top Ten national news stories. Top Ten local news stories. Top Ten pictures. We'll have them all for you over the next couple of weeks. And this year, we add one important project in which you can participate the Top Ten suburban newsmakers of 2010. We looked back at the year and identified 10 suburbanites who made a marked difference in our area and beyond during the past year.
You can join in the recognition by going to dailyherald.com and selecting the story that you think deserves top-of-the top billing. But you should act soon. Voting ends Friday.
Not that your decision will be easy. The nominees include everything from a military hero to a neighborhood activist who blocked a $20 million development taxpayers would have underwritten. They are teenagers, musicians, athletes, reality-television stars and, yes, even politicians.
Even if you're not interested in voting, you should take a look at the list. It will remind you of what virtue there is in our communities — and in our newspapers — every day, especially at a time when many of the “top stories” you read about will have to do with political squabbles, natural disasters and human tragedies.
If, by the way, you're looking for year-end retrospectives that mix both the bad and the good, I happened to run across one that newspaper readers, in particular, may enjoy. The national Center for Plain Language — yes, there is indeed a think tank for everything — gives awards every year for government and commercial documents that are written either especially clearly or especially poorly.
The project the foundation declared least comprehensible was the I-94 document that the United States requires every “nonimmigrant visitor not in possession of a visitor's visa, who is a national of one of the countries enumerated in 8 CFR 217” to fill out. The suburbs even make an appearance, with Research in Motion — the Blackberry manufacturer with operations in Rolling Meadows — winning honorable mention for an 8,000-word Internet Service End User Agreement that you're supposed to be able to read on your Blackberry, though considering the incomprehensible legalese of all those end user agreements you click through 20 times a day while using electronic or online products, picking on RIM seems a bit capricious.
Last year's Grand Prize winner for clarity was a website dealing with lower back pain. I know. You're probably already set to click back to the projects you can snicker at.
Which emphasizes the challenge that “good news” has when it's up against “bad news” for staking out a plot in your memory, pointing up all the more what special stories our local heroes must be to deserve so much attention in a world distracted by the dramatic. We hope our newsmakers project helps you appreciate both sides of the street as you trek down Memory Lane over the next couple of weeks and gives you some moments of history you'll be glad to live over.
• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is an assistant managing editor at the Daily Herald.