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Letter from the Editor: Things I wish I'd asked my grandparents

I've been doing a lot of reading lately about the 1918 flu pandemic.

Medicine and technology have advanced light years since then, and the most vulnerable then had been the young and healthy rather than the old and infirm who are most at risk today.

But it's odd how much of today's response to the COVID-19 pandemic seems to echo the past.

The initial response then, like now, had been to downplay the dangers, both government and the news media seeming at first to be more focused on calming nerves than protecting lives.

My grandparents lived through that pandemic. My paternal grandparents lost an infant daughter to it.

How I wish now that I had asked about what that pandemic had been like.

Never did. When you're a kid you live in your own world and seldom think, I suppose, to ask about other ones.

Would knowing something of it have helped prepare for this one, helped to somehow figure this one out?

Maybe, maybe not. But at least it would have helped connect me to that distant past and to my grandparents' lives, to better understand their struggles and their strength and resilience.

How much we take for granted.

Boy, if these days of pandemic and fear, these times of sacrifice and isolation teach anything, they teach that. How much we take for granted.

I don't know if your grandkids will ask you about this pandemic. I don't know if mine will.

But I'm not going to wait to be asked.

I'm going to chronicle that story, figure out a way to pass down the account of their family's engagement with history.

If you think of it more broadly, that's what we're trying to do here, on the pages of your newspaper.

If you look back at the reporting of the 1918 pandemic, you'll be surprised and frustrated by how little light was sprinkled on the horror that stole so many millions of lives.

World War I both competed for attention and influenced the coverage. The war effort, in fact, gave the government of that time enormous and frightening powers to silence any critical press.

There are some echoes of the 1918 pandemic, but our aim is to make sure that isn't one of them.

Like life everywhere, the life of the newspaper has been flipped on its head by this outbreak.

To make sense of it, we're forced to begin with a mission statement. Our mission is simple: To help you through it. And to help you explain it to your grandchildren, and to their grandchildren too.

John Lampinen.
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