People of America: It's Not Us, It's You

It's always nice to be regaled by the stories of a veteran journalist.

No one tells a story better than a storyteller who has mastered their craft. And few people have more stories to tell than someone who has done it for decades to make a living. 

I had this privilege last week, but it wasn't all fun and games. 

Last week, I was in a Q & A session with Dr. Sridhar Krisnaswami of SRM University in Chennai, India, a longtime foreign correspondent working in America for The Hindu. He told us in the audience about the success of Indian newspapers right now, The Hindu alone boasting a modest four million circulation. 

Wait four million?! Stop the presses. Or run them. A lot. 

I'm about to employed by a newspaper with around four thousand, three thousand in print, a figure I was pleased to hear. 

But four million? As in 4,000,000? 

It just seemed unrealistic. Or promising. 

I had to ask Krisnaswami what the Indian secret was. Was it something they did? Was it something (else) in the water? How could a tried and true, red, white and blue rag harness some of that Indian success? 

The answer was as discouraging as the potential solution was hopeful. 

It's the literacy rate, he told me. The percentage of literate people has been on the rise in India, and with millions of people clamoring to exercise their new ability to dissect the written word, newspapers were front and center to provide the goods. 

I never thought America's already firm grasp of reading the English language would be a blight to my chosen industry. Go figure. 

It's almost as much a commentary on the direction of American society as much as it is one on the Indian newspaper industry. The people of India want to read, want to learn. Americans? We've been granted so many apparently unearned gifts that we no longer realize what we have. 

We could catch up on world events, but instead the people of the world's most active seeker of global justice is more concerned with the affairs of a handful of neanderthals in a New Jersey townhouse. We could vote, we could paint, we could just about anything we damn well please, but having all that freedom is quite frankly too much work. 

Really, America? 

Not that you're listening.