And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, "Editor Emeritus"

... that radio commentator Paul Harvey had a successful program he called “the rest of the story.” There are many times when I hear or read a story that I am left to wonder what has not been said.

An example was a weekend story about how someone earning minimum wage could not afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment in a large Iowa city.

My first question was, was this a single person? If so, why does she or he need two bedrooms? A one bedroom would be considerably cheaper.

I also wondered about the age and educational background of this person.

Because a minimum wage was never intended to be a “living” wage. It started as a way to introduce someone with no higher qualifications to a position in which he or she could grow to earn a living wage. Or to introduce young people to the world of work.

If an adult, male in particular, has been in that work world for a few years and is still earning a minimum wage, he has done something wrong somewhere along in his earlier life, i.e., dropped out of high school.

That’s probably a little less true of, say, a married female, who is willing to take a lower paying, non-skilled position to provide a second income for the family.

But two minimum wage jobs in a family probably won’t cut it, nor should it. Each should advance after a short time.

Another story which caused me to wonder what the truth is was the story about illegal immigrants being separated from children when arrested for breaching the border. They go to holding cells, while the young children are housed in make-shift units elsewhere. That is the law.

But until recently it has not been enforced, and adults were assigned a court time and then released with the children. Often, that court date was not kept and the family blended into the rest of the population.

It seems harsh to separate families, despite the illegality of their actions. But one source said it has been discovered that quite often the young people being protected were not really the children of the accompanying adults, but rather children who had been smuggled north by “coyotes” who collected payment. It proved almost impossible in the short time allowed to determine if parents actually were truly parents.

The “rest of the story” is hard to come by when major TV networks and newspapers all seem to carry their editorial bias into their news columns.

Apparently even the FBI isn’t immune to bias by individual agents.

Where is Paul Harvey when we need him?