The Valley News was born in 1952 and so was I. This is probably coincidence, but I like to think there is more to our association than the fact that we are both from the year of the water dragon in the Chinese calendar.

According to the Internet, “water dragons are usually in charge of some hard and laborious work.” Newspaper deadlines were a marathon, a sprint, and a charge up San Juan Hill, and I survived despite several nasty paper cuts through the years.

Still, I ended my active career with pride, knowing that we produced something that contributed to life here, and I don’t discount the fact that pulp paper started wood stove fires, wrapped fish, lined bird cages and tamped down weeds in gardens. It’s good to be useful in things great and small.

I am pleased I made a living by typing and deleting words. It won’t be long before the main form of human communication will be via TikTok dances.

Still it hurts me a little when online critics dance on what they presume will be the newspaper graveyard. Recently, the Valley News’ announcement of a price hike was met by a small chorus of jeers on Facebook. It was the usual stuff: too liberal, too much wire copy (not true these days, by my reckoning), and general hard feelings associated with the cultural civil war.

The worst: “Can’t wait until the valley news is dead.”

Ouch!

The writer, if I snooped correctly, is in the car business, which has its own critics. I work myself into a state before I go into a dealer, as if I were about to hand myself over to hucksters, scammers and demons. My wife doesn’t recognize what comes over me. I am entering an underworld of cologne and fake charm, where no one wishes me well. (I refer to the new system of buying cars, where they kidnap you for a few hours, not the old one, where I was fortunate to know several good car salespeople.)

One time I sat with a finance guy and it was clear that we both despised each other. He looked at me with cold, hard eyes and I sneered back. He handed me a sheet of warranty add-ons that looked like a Denny’s menu. I think the Moose Repellent Coating tipped me off that some of it was excessive.

But that is in the past and I do not wish that the dealer goes bust. I just want a sales contract that says, “We have tried our best to induce you to pay too much for this product and related services, and all our expressions of friendliness were manufactured and insincere; despite your best efforts this deal is still weighted heavily in our favor, and if there are any later problems the sales manager will be unreachable, henceforth until the end of time.”

Of course, I was in the newspaper business (now the media business), and not cars. Certain people may find it hard to believe, but we tried to be fair-minded in pursuit of truth. Mistakes were made. We admitted them. We allowed readers to call us out, in print.

The Internet came along and crushed the advertising business model like Godzilla ripping through power lines. Smarter people than me are working on a new model. I wish them well, but I can’t predict the future. At some point it will go on without me.

The past was kinder to news on paper. Recently the Bugbee Senior Center in Hartford hosted a program on Will Rogers, the cowboy humorist who in the 1920s and 1930s was as big as the social influencers of today. He was a star of film, radio and yes, newspapers. More than 500 of them carried his daily and weekly columns.

I looked online for his writing and found this bit he wrote after a spell of globe trotting. “I am glad to get back home and read some papers! A breakfast without a newspaper is a horse without a saddle. You are just riding bareback if you got no news for breakfast. Don’t underestimate your paper. I don’t care how small it is, and how little news you think it might have in it at that particular issue. Lord kiss it, for the news that it does bring you.”

Rogers is well remembered for saying, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” These days, some cultivate dislike for lots of people they’ve encountered, and millions of others for good measure.

We have been led into a bad place, but it wasn’t newspapers that took us there.

Dan Mackie lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.