Dear Steady Community,
Thank you. Thank you for your support, encouragement, wisdom, and empathy. Thank you for challenging us, sharing your voices, and inviting others to join the conversation.
We are moved today for reflection because this newsletter is our 500th. It is a milestone that seems hard to believe. When we published our first post on January 22, 2021, we had no idea what this might become. Looking back, however, there are two things we can say with certainty: This endeavor has vastly exceeded our expectations, and it is entirely because of all of you.
Our hopes, from the beginning, were to create a community that wasn’t beholden to the tyranny of internet clickbait and social media’s opaque algorithms. We wanted to communicate directly, and Substack offered a platform to do that. So we jumped in and just started swimming. It’s all we knew how to do.
We were eager to share a sense of the world that didn’t shy away from tragedies and injustices but also celebrated the kindness, beauty, and hope that infuses the best of our human instincts. We called it Steady because we felt we all could use a bit more balance.
We had no idea how many people would care about our fledgling newsletter, let alone show up and sign up. We didn’t know whether we could make it self-sustaining. We couldn’t predict how long we could keep it going.
And yet here we all are, 499 posts later. Our gratitude is limitless.
The future remains unknowable. It always is. But our hope is that we can keep publishing Steady in some form for a long time. And we hope you continue to join us, invite others to sign up, and fill the comments with your thoughts, questions, and discourse with each other.
These are difficult times; we all have been through difficulties before.
This is a time for action; we all have seen how activism can change the world.
This is a moment to lean on each other; communities of support can forge unimaginable resilience.
Steady means we keep going, together. It means we do so while recognizing there will inevitably be more heartbreak in our future. But hopefully there will be joy as well. We will have days of tears but also perhaps some reasons to smile. We can celebrate our successes and resolve to tackle our challenges. But we don’t give up. We don’t back up; we don’t turn around. Forward is our direction, always with our eyes on the far horizon. Future generations depend on our perseverance.
So onward we go. Bolstered by each other. And steady.
Thank you all.
Please consider subscribing if you aren’t already a member. This effort is supported by the Steady community.
Thank you. You expressed all the reasons why I read Steady. I know that I needed this, someone to state my thought and feelings out loud.
Much of what Dan Rather writes is kind and welcoming. But his posts also accept the Corporatist structure we have which promotes censorship and totalitarian control by those institutions. When CEO's made 25x what they paid their average worker the idea was 'it wasn't so bad here.' People were paying their bills--if you were white and middle class. Colleges were expanding and tthat was seen as great progress especially when women were being allowed in more easily. However, that was also when industry needed highly skilled workers and schools needed teachers to train them for industry. That period ended by the 1970's when industry began to move elsewhere. Technology was developing and being used to replace workers except in the computer/financial spheres but even that is done for. AI has been on the drawing board for decades to eliminate this entire layer of workers. WE need journalists who will not just give us pacifying, pleasantries. WE need investigative journalists who will confront the corporate structure that is destroying the lives of the public. And the medical industry needs to be at the top of the list along with the military that works in cahoots with Big Pharma. How many people know these covid drugs were developed with the DOD contracting with the drug corps. Huh? What is the military doing in the drug business. Oh, yes, they are heavily invested bioweaponry which is exactly what these covid drugs are. One only has to read the contracts with Pfizer, as one example, to know this. Or read the patents filed and see who is working on them! There is no nice guy in that arena and we need journalists who will stand up. The horrors of the situation today are seen in how journalists will not stand up for Julian Assange, a journalist, an Australian who never worked in the US is being railroaded under the espionage act for printing material given to him that embarasses the US. Freedom of speech? If/when Assange goes down as it happening now, there will never be freedom of speech or freedom of the press. This is what we need to be reading about, not being given sweet tasting lolliops.