More Sunday Stuff

Like most of you I’m sure, I’m in the midst of the typical Christmas/holiday stuff in anticipation of the big day, as it were. And I guess that is probably a really boring way I’ll admit to lead into the fact that I received a bit of jarring news related to this site a short time ago.

This is a link to an excellent tribute to Shaun Mullen written by Valerie Russ at inquirer.com. Shaun passed away recently, as noted in the story – natural causes were cited. He wrote at the blog Kiko’s House for many years, though his career in journalism was rich in reporting on all sorts of major stories from the Vietnam War (about which he authored a book of Philadelphia residents who were casualties) to the MOVE bombing (which, most definitely, is a landmark story in this area, and not for positive reasons overall). As noted in Russ’s tribute, Shaun worked at an editor at the Philadelphia Daily News for many years.

There was a time when I was trying to build up the profile of this site by writing longer-form pieces with more links and also leave comments at other noteworthy sites (Shaun’s site and Above Average Jane come immediately to mind, as well as The Existentialist Cowboy, and Avedon Carol’s site, the name of which escapes me at the moment). For all kinds of reasons, I was not able to devote the time and effort into accomplishing the goal I set out to achieve in the beginning, but I still believed then as now that I can accomplish some good in constituting this site as you read and view it today.

When I was able to write longer pieces with more links way back when, Shaun was gracious enough to leave comments. That is something he most definitely did not need to do, but I appreciated it and still do. In case you haven’t guessed, I do this as a hobby pretty much; as previously noted, this is not a source of income. Thankfully for me, I don’t have to worry about making a livelihood out of this. Again, I’m not complaining, since that’s more my responsibility than anyone else’s. Shaun was the seasoned, actual journalist, and if I manage to concoct something akin to actual journalism at this site, it’s probably more of an accident than for any other reason.

I guess you can consider this my way of saying thanks to Shaun for his support. We need all of the courageous voices of independent journalism we can get. Now that Shaun’s has been stilled, it’s up to us to continue to advocate for those who need whatever support we can muster in order to ultimately achieve something akin to social justice. Put another way, as Ted Kennedy said about Bobby at his brother’s eulogy, “Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.”

I don’t know if Shaun would have wanted that kind of an epitaph, but my guess is that, somehow, he wouldn’t have minded it too much either.

Update 12/23/19: This is what I was looking for earlier (and I corrected the name misspelling - my bad).