Press Sense or Lack of It

Last Saturday I spent the latter part of the evening with C-SPAN, with my favorite interviewer, Brian Lamb I think his name is, whose subjects were Bill Press and then retiring United States Supreme Court Justice Stevens. At first, I didn’t realize who Bill Press was, for I never watch CNN. It was an old program, first aired several years ago. He was entertaining in telling about his life and the source of the word “spin” [had a book out with “Spin” in the title] and about becoming a panelist on Firing Line on CNN, which we watched many years ago but not with him as a participant.

He said he was the first member of his family who went to college. Then he was in seminary where he studied for the Catholic priesthood. When he learned he would end up as a high school teacher, he left the seminary. He wanted something better than school teaching, that is, he wanted his own outreach to spread farther afield than to youths in a classroom. When he expressed his summation that a benevolent God would not send an airplane crashing into the twin towers in New York, I tuned him out, checking the minutes till the next interview. It’s amazing that he would attend seminary and not learn about the free-moral agency that is within all of us. And that while God has ultimate power, the devil is on the earth doing much damage. God created us with brains, conscience and will so that we could conduct our lives, in all parts of the world, to avoid such things as the tragedy of 9/11/01. God didn’t fail us. We failed Him.

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