Politics

I Can’t Run For Mayor Because I Already Posted My Breasts Online

I’m forever tainted now

Upset by the direction of local politics, a lady at the grocery store urged me to run for mayor next time.

“I can’t,” I told her. “I already posted my breasts online.”

I don’t think she believed me. I was standing there in the grocery store looking pretty sloppy with my gray hair in a bun and no makeup. Let’s face it, 57-year-old women like me are not who you’d assume are posting boob selfies.

So I whipped out my phone and showed her the relevant Medium pieces in which I decided the story could not be told without photos of my breasts.

Crazy things have been going on in the small town where I live.

It would take too long to list them all and it’s only interesting to people who live here. But everyone is in a tizzy, and now I’m being stopped everywhere I go by people who think I can do something.

Until 2015, I was the editor of the daily paper here. It’s still being published on a limited basis, but it no longer qualifies as what I’d call a newspaper. My community, like many others, is a news desert now.

People have noticed the difference.

I’ve had people contact me via every way you can think of, asking me what can be done.

I had someone stop me on the street while I was walking my dogs on Election Day wanting to know which local candidates she should vote for.

Another person sent me a picture of the sample ballot with local candidates marked, wanting to know if I could tell her who was good.

There’s been far too little local news coverage here in recent years.

The local public radio station does what it can, but it’s not enough.

This is exactly why crazy things are happening. I used to be a cat, and we cats used to keep an eye on the mice. All the kitties have been laid off now, and my, those little mousies have been enjoying the ability to play without supervision.

Somebody has to start paying attention to local news.

I admit that I hadn’t been. I grieved over the loss of my newspaper career. It was really all I ever wanted to do. I was good at it. The thing about a small-town newspaper is the editor gets to do a little bit of everything.

At a big paper, you have to specialize in one thing. At a small paper, you supervise the staff, write the editorials, write a column, edit every scrap of news, choose the photos, choose what national and international news to include … you do it all. And it’s fun.

I loved it. I will miss it forever. But I had to walk away from local news after being laid off, for the same reason you don’t keep hanging out with your ex after he breaks up with you. I had to move on, and I did.

In the meantime, the paper’s staff kept shrinking and eventually, there was nobody left to cover the news. And I’ll promise you this: Even when things do come to light, you shouldn’t think you know the worst. You don’t even know what you don’t know.

When I was editor, we routinely found shit out.

That’s because I had a very good staff until the hedge fund that owned us kept laying people off to put a few more bucks into the executives’ pockets. We broke stories. We uncovered things. We wrote about them. Everybody was better off with the people knowing the people’s business.

I am positive some things went by that we never knew about. But we caught a lot of stuff. Now? Nobody is really looking.

It’s like leaving a house full of toddlers unsupervised.

Even if they’re good kids, you know you cannot trust them. Somebody has to keep an eye on them. It’s for their own good.

And not all of them are good kids, you know? Some of them are running with scissors and drawing pictures on the wall with permanent markers.

I held myself to certain standards when I was a working journalist.

I never put a campaign sign in my yard or signed anyone’s candidacy petition. My first political yard sign was Biden’s, and I felt that when I put it up, I was accepting that my days as a journalist were over.

I wouldn’t have posted a photograph of my breasts online if I were still the editor of the paper. Even though these photos were of a medical nature and were about the serious business of breast lumps, I wouldn’t have done it.

But I did it.

I’m not sorry, either.

I’ve long been an advocate of changing societal views of breasts. If you want to get me good and mad, suggest that a nursing mom shouldn’t have the right to feed her baby in public. You will regret speaking up, I promise.

I nursed my kids everywhere I went. I think breasts are just normal body parts. They aren’t there just to make you look good in a bikini when you’re young.

There’s nothing wrong with them being enjoyed sexually at all. But that’s not all they are.

Breasts are multi-functional body parts.

And sometimes they turn on you and you have to have surgery to protect your health or save your life.

So lighten up. They aren’t just sexual. There was absolutely nothing “dirty” about the photos I posted.

However, if I entered local politics, I am sure I would be able to count on some local Trumper downloading the picture and coming up with some dumb post.

I don’t want to be mayor.

I think I can best serve as a journalist, not a politician. Covering news is the easy part. Making enough money to pay for my time is the hard part. I’m not in a position to work for free.

This is the problem a lot of people face. You want to do some good in the world, but you also need to buy groceries. The most important jobs in our society tend to pay the least.

Hedge funds control an awful lot of news. Small papers still make a modest profit when owned locally, but they’re not very easy to start from scratch. There’s a lot of value in the legacy of a trusted local paper — or there used to be.

Of all the problems going on in our society, this is one that people aren’t as worried about as they should be.

Most people will probably care more about the oh-so-terrible breast pictures.

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I’m a writer in central Illinois. Find me on Substack, Mastodon, Twitter or LinkedIn.