Citizen Reader

Sometimes when I am writing for The Progressive I find I am learning more than I really wanted to know.

Over the last few months, a story has been developing about a twenty-one-year-old Massachusetts man named Jack Teixeira, who, it has been found, has been leaking classified documents online for some time. Teixeira is now in jail and is being charged under the Espionage Act for revealing top-secret documents that he first accessed in his work as an Air National Guard member.

This is another one of those news stories that will come and go and which won't even register with many people. Let's face it, a lot of the news is that way lately. Complicated, deals with wars far away, includes vocabulary we don't understand (in the Teixeira story, I keep getting hung up on the phrase "Discord server," which I guess is something a lot of gamers know about, but it makes me feel old to think about and not really understand or care what that is), and, oh yes, most of us are kept busy in America trying to stay employed and retain access to our health insurance (even though interacting with our health insurance companies and doctors' offices takes so long and is often so unsuccessful that it actually makes it difficult for us to focus on our jobs).

I'm not really here today to tell you why you should care about the Teixeira story. I totally get it if you don't. However, I recently did have the chance to write an op/ed on this subject, titled "For Whistleblowers, Motives Matter," that was published at The Progressive (and elsewhere; The Progressive does this really neat thing where they help train you to write op/eds and then they share them around, called "Progressive Perspectives"). This was a new experience for me; I've got lots of opinions and my partner could tell you I love to editorialize, but I had never written an op/ed. Nor had I ever co-written anything, and for this piece I had the honor of working with Lisa Ling, a military veteran and whistleblower (she was featured in the excellent Sonia Kennebeck movie National Bird, which you should watch, if you haven't yet).

It was a new experience and I learned rather more than I wanted to know, from Lisa, about today's military and what it all does and where it all is (and I was grateful to her for writing this one with me). While you're still alive, you have to learn, right?

My career, such as it is, has not been filled with many highs, but I had one last month when I got an article published in a national print magazine for the very first time: "Kissinger's Culpability."

This is the first line in that article, and I stand by it:

"Henry Kissinger is still alive and still in possession of the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded in 1973. Time will eventually address the former issue; as to the latter, the Nobel Foundation has declared that 'none of the prize awarding committees in Stockholm and Oslo has ever considered [revoking] a prize once awarded."

The article was published in the April/May 2023 issue of The Progressive, which had an antiwar theme and included a lot of great pieces on the lasting impacts of the Iraq War and the expensive boondoggle that has been the F-35 fighter jet program (among many others). 

I learned a lot about Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, a lot of atrocities I'd never really known much about, and how the Nobel Prize Foundation surrounds itself with a shocking amount of secrecy. But I also learned, thanks to Martin Edwin Andersen (himself a whistleblower) about an ambassador and State Department employee named Robert C. Hill.

Hill started and ended his career as a Republican, but while he started it as one of Nixon's cronies who helped to derail the 1968 peace talks that might have shortened the Vietnam War, he ended it as an ambassador to Argentina who was more than a little disturbed at the "green light" that Kissinger gave the leaders of the military junta there during their "dirty war" in the 1970s. I won't give you all the details of Hill's story, but overall he appears to have been a person who was ideologically motivated, but who could still look around the many places to which he was posted as an ambassador (El Salvador, Mexico, Spain, and Argentina) and at least NOTICE when something was going murderously awry.

The world needs more people like that. People will always have ideological leanings, and opinions, and experiences...but if those same people can actually look at what is happening around them--and strive to understand it--well, that would make the world just a little bit better. At least that's what I choose to believe.

Now, I am of course biased. I have written online articles for The Progressive, and I have been published in their magazine, so you may have to take my words with a grain of salt. But I just wanted to take a moment here and tell you how much I have enjoyed working for them. In a world where most journalism outlets seem to be publishing everything as fast and with as little fact-checking as possible, I have found writing for The Progressive to be refreshingly rigorous. Every online article I submit to them seems to be read and edited by four to six people, up to and including their publisher. They expect rigorous fact-checking and research, and they also do a stupendous job of cleaning up my writing (which can get wordy, so I am grateful for their help).

In addition to good strong editorial work, the magazine also clearly appeals to a group of people with whom I feel an affinity. A while back the magazine put out a call for donations (they are a nonprofit organization), and when a friend of mine asked about sending a check rather than giving a donation site her credit card information, I asked the publisher if that was possible (and where to send the check). He not only answered my friend's questions promptly, he noted that many people who subscribe or donate to The Progressive are not over-comfortable with sharing their information online. Those are my people, friends.

The April/May issue of the magazine in which my article appears can be purchased in bookstores or online; but if you are at all open to a progressive take on the news stories of the day, I can promise you that The Progressive will give you a lot of good, actually fact-checked bang for your buck.