Ellen Bueno: New BNR columnist lives here, loves news

 

Hello, Baraboo News Republic readers. I’m honored that the management of this fine publication has invited me to be its newest opinion columnist. They could have played it safe with a popular syndicated writer, but chose to take a chance on a local scribbler, so I’ll do my best to keep this corner of the newspaper fresh and thought-provoking. In this first column I’d like to introduce myself to you a bit, but promise to move on to more interesting topics in the future.

I am a Wisconsin girl – a cradle Packer fan who loves squeaky cheese curds and the muddy Mississippi. I was born in my parents’ hometown of Lancaster, a small farming community where everybody knew everybody, and grandmas had the whole family over for Sunday dinner after church. And it was "dinner," mind you. Breakfast, dinner, supper. Years later, when my family moved to the northeast side of Milwaukee, it took me a long time to get used to saying "breakfast, lunch and dinner" like a proper suburbanite.

Actually, I was never a proper suburbanite. While I learned to love many things about Milwaukee – the lakefront, the museums, and the ethnic diversity – the suburbs had something I’d never encountered before: snobbery. It astonished me that my 11-year-old classmates had already learned how to sort people out according to country club memberships and the ownership of Lacoste shirts bought at certain shops on east Silver Spring Drive.

And then there was the tyranny of the lawns. Hardworking dads and moms spent their Saturdays manicuring the vegetation into neat geometrics — which is fine if you like that, but I suspected that most of that clipping and trimming was motivated by fear. Why else would anyone spend hours on a chore as obsessive-compulsive as edging the lawn? It’s a tough world when the neighbors think you’re an uncivilized yokel for allowing blades of grass to touch your sidewalk.

So, although I made life-long friends in Milwaukee, I knew I was too middle class and sloppy to survive among the country clubbers and lawn edgers. When my husband, Ted, and I were looking for a place to call home in 1988, we looked for someplace smaller. We’d already lived in Eau Claire (too cold) and Madison (too cry-baby). We were won over by Baraboo because it was the right size and was ideally located in the middle of everything that’s best in Wisconsin. And we’re still here 21 years later because Baraboo is full of friendly people (including people who belong to the golf club and edge their lawns.)

As for my academic life, I completed a couple of years of college as an art major before marrying. After that, I worked as a graphic artist while Ted slogged through four years of medical school.

When it was time to start a family, I chose to stay home with our daughters, Cassie, Mindy and Elizabeth. But as they got into their middle-school years, I decided to finish up that bachelor’s degree. I commuted to Edgewood College in Madison, this time as an English major. Over the years I’d become something of a news-junkie, with a growing interest in writing about politics and culture trends.

I especially enjoyed a logic class where the professor stressed the importance of being "truth-seekers." This class solidified the difference between truth and opinion for me: Truth is something we discover, not create. Opinions are something we create based on those discoveries, ideally.

Truth-seekers are like good scientists. They follow the evidence where it leads, rather than manipulate evidence to fit their theories. But this is hard. It’s more fun to blurt out opinions about global warming without trying to read those boring scientific reports. It’s also more fun to find some partisan Web blogger who says what we want to hear, and just parrot his opinions.

Josh Billings, a less famous contemporary of Mark Twain, commented on this tendency when he said, "As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."

But my goal, as I embark on the rather cheeky business of pronouncing my opinions, is to be a truth-seeker to the best of my ability. Newspaper readers demand this, thank goodness. And although you might not always agree with my conclusions, I hope my thoughts will at least be worth the read.