One of the duties I sadly inherited but happily undertake is selecting items for each week’s Memories column in the paper. I don’t do it with the same vigor or insight as did my mother, who would have turned 100 this year. Truth is, I occasionally cheat, selecting things she previously identified as newsworthy when she was running the column, as she did up until age 98.

Still, I revel — as she did, and you should — in the wonderful history of Marion and Marion County — surely something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving week.

Unfortunately, the more you look at Memories, the more you realize how much we’re missing these days. Rarely did a week go by — even as recently as 15 or 30 years ago — without some major civic event. At key points in our past, our community served not as some out-of-the-way backwater but at the very center of the mainstream, creating much of the current that ran through the body politic.

When fabled Emporia editor William Allen White wrote his acclaimed editorial “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” he was talking about the dangers of populist movements, something we see today both on the right and on the left. What we forget is that, when White was writing about the issue, he was just a pudgy pretender while key statewide leaders of the traditional Republicans, the traditional Democrats, and the upstart Populists all came not from Wichita, Kansas City, Topeka, or even Emporia but from little old Marion.

In our history, we have been home to stars in the arts, in medicine, in law enforcement, in the military, in agriculture, even in beauty pageants. We have modeled new ways of doing things that ended up being adopted elsewhere. We were leaders.

Nowadays, we’re often followers — and not even very good followers at that. We’re constantly jumping on whatever business or political bandwagon rolls through just about the time it begins to sputter to a stop. Worse yet, we’ve taken on the image — earned though it may be — as being somewhat of a Hicksville, most widely known for the illegal exploits of an imported police chief.

People seem no longer to have ideas or, at least, aren’t willing to share them. We cry “me, too” rather than “me, first.” We try to fit in rather than stand out. Worst of all, we’re horribly thin-skinned, offended for years by the slightest of comments to the point that all manner of debate and discussion, not to mention innovation, are stifled.

This Thanksgiving Day, do something you can truly be thankful for in years to come. Vow to think and study before you speak but always be willing to speak when you have thought and studied.

A good newspaper like this one doesn’t want to tell you what to think, but it does want to give you things to think about. And it needs not only subscribers but also advertisers to help support it. Time was, people advertised because they knew it was important to have reliable news available. Their ads weren’t just so they could sell goods and services. They were so they could support a free flow of information in their community.

Check out who does — and doesn’t — advertise these days. Businesses and organizations that support the free flow of news and information by providing the advertising sustenance necessary to prevent this from becoming a news desert are places deserving your support. Others may need you to speak out occasionally about how they better could support their community instead of pocketing what cash they used to contribute toward the greater good.

A wag came up to me the other day and said he bet I had three million reasons to be thankful this Thanksgiving week. He meant dollars but didn’t understand that we’ll see only a small fraction of that after taxes and legal fees. Their shares were enough to get three staff members who couldn’t take the stress of continuing to work in an environment in which some people were still lying in wait for any opportunity to attack. But our share isn’t enough to silence what couldn’t be silenced by being seized.

It’s hard, in a two-days-early week like this, to produce a paper of anywhere near our normal quality, especially when down several staff members. Whatever we eventually receive in court can guarantee our continuation only so long. Without willing support from community advertisers, newspapers — and, with them, both news and democracy— will die.

— ERIC MEYER