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BIG CITY: The biggest story of the year

Posted on December 29, 2011December 28, 2011 by Staff

Kirk Ross
Looking back at the end of the year is a natural thing to do. The downtime between semesters after the feasts and holidays always seems about right for reflection. The green leaves of summer are scarred and toasted and raked into piles. You can see the contours of the land much better, and in the quiet of the long nights, if you put your mind to it, a perspective on the year now fading also starts to reveal itself.

There’s nothing like a local newspaper to help you along in that process of reflection. When we first started publishing The Citizen in the spring of 2007, we hadn’t really conceived of exactly what to do at year’s end, but we knew it would be an important part of our mission. We wanted to make something you could put in the cedar chest as a clue for future generations of just what happened around here.

Too often, end-of-the-year issues come off as slapped-together space fillers. In an industry where the printed product is growing smaller and the online product more full of baubles than substance, putting the year in perspective has come down to cavalcades of photos and a top 10 biggest stories list. That first year, when we started planning our inaugural year-in-review issue, we thought maybe you – our readers – deserved a little more than that.

What we came up with isn’t exactly the definitive history of our community, but it’s not 365 days boiled down to 10 paragraphs.
By taking you through things month by month you can see how the year flowed, how the conflicts and controversies started, evolved and resolved over the course of the year. Big events happen of course, but the stories that really shape a community and influence the direction of it rarely are comprised of a single moment. An election or a decision taken by a governing body may be the culmination of something, but they are rarely standalone events. Protests like the ones we’ve seen in recent months might seem just to burst into view, but they’re the result of pressure building over time.

And if you’re concentrating on just the big things and the usual dominant personalities and influencers, the smaller moments of the year get lost. It may seem silly or at least unserious to add into a review the growing of a giant vegetable, the installation of a strange sculpture or the birth of twin oxen, but that’s part of what makes this place what it is and shouldn’t be left out. Things don’t have to be newsy to be news. Folks just keeping on in the face of adversity, especially in times like these, is an important story as well. And the victories and accolades that might seem small to some are giant in the lives of those people classified as “ordinary people.”

There are no ordinary people. Some make more headlines and get more ink than others, but that doesn’t make them more important than anyone else or their dreams and hopes and fears any more real.

Everyone has a story to tell – the story of how they got here, how they came to be the person they are and where they want to go in life.

In a culture that is obsessed with celebrities and wealth and power, you can lose track of that. You can forget that all over this place there are people performing simple heroic acts every day without fanfare.

When you reflect on the year past, remember those people too, because as much or more than any well-known figure, their acts of compassion, kindness and service keep this community running and are steadily shaping it’s future. That’s the biggest story of the year, any year.

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