Honor, Integrity, Decency, Truth

I don’t get a chance to write in the band blog much these days, as my day job is keeping me very occupied.  The same is true for SwingDoom and J, but the music is still in us.  No worries there.  When other things occupy more of our space than music, it makes it difficult to write blogs on our project.  But today I write not of music, but of life.  I can’t tell you how saddened I am at the passing of Tim Russert, of NBC News and Meet The Press.

I grew up in the Washington DC area and the news was always on in my parents’ house.  So I grew up pretty plugged in to what was happening in the world and that type of thing kind of stuck with me.  I’m the guy watching the cable news shows each night following the minutia of the election season.  Watching and reading so much news over the years has been a great disappointment at times, not so much by what was in the news as by how it was reported.  In the era of constant communications and minute-to-minute news coverage the media has so much time to fill that they often do a poor job of filling it.  They put folks on tv that have no business being there – people that put more effort into looking and sounding important than getting the stories right.  They basically get in the way of the news, to the point where you don’t even want to watch their shows.  One major exception to this was Russert.

I have been watching Meet The Press at every opportunity because it was so good with Tim on it.  He was all about the truth, and he got at the truth in a straightforward way that was focused on the story and not the anchor.  In essence he had the quality that so many people (in the news business and out of it) lack – humility.  As I have watched NBC tributes to Tim over the last day, what strikes me is how people have been putting into words the things that drew me to him so much.  He went about his work with honor and humility.  He did things in a transparent way – he wasn’t trying to fool or trick anybody, just ask the questions that got to the truth (and to keep asking them until he got the truth) – and his transparency spoke to his integrity.  And you could always sense that he was a decent man – he was kind to his guests and showed them a lot of respect.  But the thing that really drew me to Tim’s shows was that he was all about the truth.  For me, truth is everything.  I try to be honest with people and I expect people to be honest with me.  When you are dishonest with me, we’re done.  So to have someone on the tv each week who was all about honesty and truth – believe me I was drawn to it.

I never met Tim, although my brother happened to know him very well.  He was incredibly generous to my brother, and from what I gathered the guy you met off-camera was the same guy you saw on your television.  This was no surprise really – I think that people of substance just stand out and you can see it up close or from a distance.

I guess it’s a little odd to be writing about a news man on a rock and roll blog.  But part of writing this blog is to let anyone who wants to listen understand where the music of Q.R. Station is coming from.  And it comes from those places, people, and experiences that shape each of us in the band.  So for me, it’s people I know and people I have never met but have admired that are pieces of the music that comes out.

This world lost a good one this week.

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