Why In TF Did I Choose Journalism?

What Happens When Everyone Plays God With a Timeline

It’s 4:00am on a Friday and I don’t even have a premise yet.

My mind keeps drifting back to before retirement, when I didn’t have to think this damn much. You go through the motions: roll call, answer calls, work your beat, back each other up, go home. Some days are chaos and some days are boredom, and every once in a while you’d get a slow day that felt like mercy.

This journalism thing is different. Every day feels like a tipping point into some dystopian cyberpunk nightmare, and it’s exhausting. Whatever happened to slow news days?

And I can already hear the snark from my colleagues in the legitimate arenas of journalism. Y’all at least had a newsroom, a crew, somebody to lean on when the insanity hit. A hallway chat. An editor down the line who had to make the big-shot call. Even if the whole place is owned by some billionaire, at least the pressure gets shared. At least the accountability is social. At least there’s a process.

Me? I’m on a couch with a keyboard, and the only break room is the space between my thoughts. My editor lives in my head. No desk. No partner. No “hey, tell me if I’m tripping” moment.

And that’s when it hit me. My perceptions as a cop were skewed too, seeing the same kinds of calls, the same patterns, the same worst days on repeat. But I had something outside of me to keep me in check: partners, supervisors, policies, and the sheer fact that other eyes were always on the story I told myself.

Legacy media has that too, even with all its problems. Layers. Colleagues. Editors. Standards. And yes, owners.

Here I am in the dark, grasping at vibes like a fervent worshiper in a revival service, and the person with the final say on what goes out into the world is me.

So maybe the premise isn’t “why did I choose journalism?” Maybe it’s this: when I look at MAGA’s internal civil war, people doxxing, outing, and branding each other traitors before breakfast, I have to wonder if the meltdown isn’t just ideology, but what happens when the guardrails disappear: no editors, no standards, no shared reality-checks, just a thousand little one-man newsrooms, drunk on attention, each playing God and calling it “truth.”

Lessons Learned As A Cop

It didn’t take Substack or politics to teach me my vision could get hazy. Policing did.

One night on midnight shift I made an arrest that felt routine. The man I cuffed spent the whole ride playing the dozens, you know, talking reckless, pushing buttons, reaching for that little spark that turns a professional into a headline. I didn’t give it to him. If anything, he entertained me. I remember thinking, Nice try. I remember feeling oddly proud of myself for staying calm.

A month or so later I’m in court, and nothing is funny.

The Assistant State’s Attorney leans in like it’s standard procedure and asks if I can pick the defendant out in the courtroom. I look over the seated men and, without even realizing it, my brain starts “helping.” I’m scanning for the version of him I stored in my head: nappy hair, dark-skinned Black male, the kind of face my mind had already decided belonged in that story.

I point.

The ASA and defense attorney do that quick look at each other, the one you don’t learn in any academy manual but you learn fast in court, and then I hear it: “No, Officer. Not him. The defendant is over there.”

Over there was a very light-skinned man with straight hair. Black, yes. But not the picture my mind had been holding onto like a mugshot.

I felt my stomach drop. Not because I got “tricked,” but because I realized I had been telling myself a comforting story about myself. I had prided myself on being the fair Black cop. The professional one. The one who didn’t let skin color and stereotypes steer the wheel.

And yet my own memory, my own internal “newsroom” had quietly edited the suspect into something more familiar, more typical, more expected.

That moment stayed with me for years, because it forced an ugly admission: you can mean well and still be wrong. You can be inches away from someone in the back of your patrol car, hear their voice, feel their energy, and still let your brain file them under a category instead of a person. And when that happens, the whole case can collapse and not because the facts weren’t there, but because the witness at the center of it couldn’t even identify the human being he arrested.

If that can happen to a veteran cop who wanted to be fair, it can happen anywhere. And it’s one of the first times I understood why guardrails matter, because confidence is not the same thing as accuracy, and “I’m sure” is not a safeguard.

I learned my perception could be hazy on the job. But I also learned something worse: other people’s perception of me could be hazy too, and no amount of credentials could fix it in the moment.

Back Down South

I was back home down South, after midnight, headed to my parents’ house. I’d taken a detour through a beach community looking for a gas station, and it was like the whole town had folded up and gone to sleep. Everything was closed. Everything. I was in a Silverado pickup running on fumes, and panic makes you do dumb geometry. I stopped right in the middle of the street and held my phone up like an offering, trying to catch enough signal to search for the nearest open station. Yeah, I should’ve pulled into a parking lot. But when your needle is below E, there’s no traffic, no lights, and your phone barely works, you start making decisions that make sense only to your adrenal glands.

And in my head I had this quiet reassurance: I’m a cop. If another cop rolls up, this will be quick. Helping hand. Two minutes. “You good?” and I’m gone.

A deputy rolled up.

I explained the situation. I told him I was out of gas. I identified myself as a cop.

And that’s when the air changed.

It wasn’t anything he said at first. It was the smell. The posture. The look that says, I don’t believe you, even when your words are plain. I knew that look because I’d seen it on other faces. I’d worn it myself on nights when my own nerves were doing the driving.

They ran me. NCIC and whatever else they could pull. I’m sure a supervisor got called. I’m sure they called up North to verify my status. What should’ve been a five-minute “let’s get you pointed to gas” turned into a thirty-minute stop—me standing there in the dark, trying to stay calm while my badge sat in my mouth like a coin that didn’t spend.

That was the point that lodged in my chest: I couldn’t trust my badge to protect me. Not from suspicion. Not from the story somebody else’s mind had already written before I opened my mouth.

Years later I saw a version of that scene from the other side. Not identical, but close enough to sting. A citizen ran out of gas in the middle of the night on a dark road. Everything was closed, including the station they were a few yards away from. I helped. I got them to an open station farther down. They got gas and kept moving. No drama. No fishing expedition. Just the simple human job of make it safe, get them home.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about that night back South. I told a trusted Black colleague about it somebody I thought would understand the double vision of it all.

He never picked up the phone again.

That part hurt in a different way, because it forced another hard truth: mistrust isn’t just something “out there” in other people. It lives inside the community too, and it gets attached to symbols. Uniform. Badge. Gun. “Cop.” Sometimes you don’t even get to be a person long enough for your character to matter.

And that’s where the line came back to me not as some slogan, but as a bruise. James Baldwin once wrote that in Harlem folks used to say, if you had to call a cop, “for God’s sake” try to make sure it was White, because a Black policeman could “completely demolish you,” hungry to prove he wasn’t “Black like you.” Not because it’s fair. Not because it’s true in every case. But because in this country, that suspicion has its own momentum and once it starts rolling, it doesn’t care what your intentions were.

That night down South taught me something I didn’t want to learn: a badge isn’t always a badge. Sometimes it’s just a word you say into the dark while another man decides what story your body fits. And once you’ve lived that, once you’ve watched “the facts” get rewritten by somebody else’s suspicion, you start to understand why guardrails matter. Not vibes. Instruments.

China Flight 006

That’s why I keep thinking about China Airlines Flight 006, because it’s one of the clearest real-world parables we’ve got for what happens when humans can’t trust what they’re seeing on the gauges and they start freelancing inside the fog.

February 19, 1985. A Boeing 747SP, Flight 006, out over the Pacific, about 300 nautical miles northwest of San Francisco, cruising at about 41,000 feet, headed from Taipei to Los Angeles. It’s late morning Pacific time about 10:16 a.m. and the flight is so normal that people are eating and moving around like the sky is just another hallway. Then No. 4 engine loses power, and what should’ve been an emergency that stays inside the cockpit becomes an emergency that spills into everyone’s bones.

Here’s the part I need you to feel: you don’t get terror all at once. Terror creeps in through confusion. The plane starts doing something “slightly off,” and most passengers can’t translate it. They just know their bodies are being pushed sideways. People were heard praying. Not polite praying. Not performative praying. Survival praying of the kind that comes out of people who aren’t even sure what they believe until they’re staring at the edge of their life.

That’s not a roller coaster. That’s your brain doing the math: I might not make it home.

Up front, the crew is fighting a different kind of horror: spatial disorientation. In cloud, your inner ear becomes a liar with a confident tone. You can be rolling and not feel it. You can be dropping and convince yourself it’s something else. So the instruments, the very tools built to keep you honest start looking “wrong” because your body is insisting on a lie.

The plane drops and accelerates, and now you’ve got speed on top of confusion. The kind of speed that makes you feel like the aircraft is being pushed beyond what it was designed to tolerate. And then the physics starts talking in a language nobody can negotiate with: G-forces.

G-forces aren’t “thrills.” They’re gravity turned into a weapon. At 1G, you are you. At higher G, your body becomes heavier than it has any right to be. Your arms don’t feel heavy. They feel unavailable. Your head doesn’t feel tired. It feels stapled down. That’s what the crew was fighting while they were trying to take control of the airplane, while the cabin behind them was becoming a place where loose bodies and loose objects don’t drift gently. They slam.

And for a stretch of it, nobody can even fully confirm what “up” is. Cloud cover steals the outside reference. So the plane can be in an abnormal attitude and the body can misreport it. That’s what disorientation is: you’re inverted and your senses insist you’re fine.

Then mercifully, brutally, the aircraft breaks out of the clouds low enough for the horizon to come back like a judge walking into the room. The crew regains control. The airplane stabilizes. And the part that matters for what I’m trying to say about the news: the plane holds.

It’s damaged. It’s been abused. People are injured. Systems are strained. But the airframe and the underlying structure does what it was built to do long enough for imperfect humans to find their way back to something like level flight and get everybody down alive.

And let me say it like this, because some of us act like this is the first time the cabin lights flickered.

We have been in a damn near crash before. The frame held.

We were born in a Revolutionary War, stitching a country together while it was still bleeding. The frame held.

We tore ourselves open in the Civil War, and somehow kept the idea of a “we” alive long enough to rebuild. The frame held.

We walked into the Great Depression with empty pockets and full panic, and still crawled back toward work, toward dignity, toward a future. The frame held.

We watched Kennedy fall, then King, and cities burned with grief and rage because the lie had gotten too heavy to carry in silence. The frame held.

And on January 6th, when a mob tried to turn the whole system into a souvenir, we watched the building get violated and the ritual get tested. And still, the count finished. The transfer happened. The frame held.

Not because the pilots were perfect. Not because the passengers weren’t terrified. Not because the instruments were always read right.

But because there is something built into this aircraft, this republic, this messy machine, that can take a hit and still fly if enough people decide, in the worst moment, to stop free-handing the controls and start reading what’s actually on the dashboard.

And here’s the part I didn’t know at 4:00 a.m. when I opened that laptop with nothing but fatigue and static in my head.

I Now See

I thought I was down here by myself. I thought this was a one-man newsroom, one man in the dark, one man guessing at the instruments while the clouds pressed in. I thought the loneliness was the job description.

And I’ll be honest about why I believed that so easily: I’ve lived the kind of loneliness that teaches you not to reach out. I’ve told you about the night I got treated like a suspect for nothing more than running out of gas. I’ve told you how I finally opened up to a trusted Black colleague about what that did to me and he never picked up the phone again. No argument. No explanation. Just silence. The kind that makes you stop expecting company.

So when I started typing, part of me was already resigned. I was staring at the cockpit and forgetting the cabin. Staring at the chaos and forgetting the chorus. Staring at the storm and forgetting the hands…your hands steadying this whole operation.

Because every time you read, every time you share, every time you reply, every time you hit that button and say, “Keep going,” you become the crew. You become the extra set of eyes on the gauges. You become the voice that says, “No—level out. Stay with the facts. Don’t let fear fly the plane.”

So no, I’m not alone. Not anymore.

And if we’re going to keep this thing in the air and if we’re going to keep telling the truth while the world tries to punish the messenger then I’m going to need you right here with me, shoulder to shoulder, reading the instruments together.

So here’s my ask.

Look around at what we’re up against. People on the right-wing grifter circuit are taking in millions from billionaire patrons and small-dollar rage alike to bankroll propaganda and pressure campaigns that help pass legislation designed to restrict your right to vote and control what you can do with your own body. They’re getting paid, loudly, to shrink your freedom.

So I’m done being shy about this.

This is the new me: I’m doing XVOA full time now, and I have no qualms asking you to help fund the opposite. Not to “tip a creator,” but to underwrite a newsroom that refuses to kneel and also one that checks the instruments, pulls the receipts, and tells the truth before the beehive stings half the village.

If you can afford it, become a paid subscriber. If you can’t, stay with me, read, share, and bring one more person into the cabin. Either way, thank you. But if you’ve been waiting for a moment to turn “I support this” into something real, this is that moment.

Sources:

1. https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/AAR8603.pdf

2. https://time.com/archive/6706773/diving-from-the-heavens/

3. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-02-20-mn-303-story.html