“Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.” — Horace Greeley

If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not talk about journalism today.

There are plenty of lessons to be learned on the media’s approach to the 2020 contests (FIRE THE POLLSTERS!), but my brain is too sleep-deprived, caffeine- and Halloween-candy-addled, and numbers-scrambled for any of my usual fine-tuned analyses.

So the Hinkley wisdom on the faults and virtues of journalism will have to wait for a future edition.

But I do want to talk about journalists.

Journalists, who are real people, after all, with husbands and wives and sons and daughters and mothers and fathers in various stages of health. With responsibilities for taxes and bills and house maintenance and lawncare while many of them, when factored on a true hourly basis, make somewhere less than minimum wage.

Who worried about how safe it was for their children to trick-or-treat or for them to hand out candy, and who worried on Tuesday morning, watching coronavirus numbers climb anew, about whether they’d get to see their family for Thanksgiving or Christmas, whether this was the last Thanksgiving or Christmas their grandma or grandpa or mom or dad might be around, how they were going to shop for their kids’ Christmas presents if things shut down again.

Who also worried, waking up Tuesday morning to a screaming front-page headline about the resurging pandemic, about what that meant for their jobs, their future ability to take care of those kids, that house, that parent.

Who also wondered, as they headed to the polls that day, what the outcome of Tuesday’s contests would mean for the future of their family, for the future of their community, for the future of their nation, about how each of the men seeking to lead them might handle that pandemic, the economy, the ongoing conflicts overseas.

Yes, I want to talk about journalists, who woke up Tuesday morning just like you, but spent Tuesday night very differently.

Journalists, with all those same worries and frustrations as you, many of them groggy from a Monday night of restless anticipation and planning and stress, clambered into their office on Tuesday and scanned social media to see more public denunciation of their trade, their colleagues, their friends, themselves. It’s been that always, but now louder, fiercer, meaner, more frequent, enough to make even the diehards among them wish they’d wanted to be doctors or lawyers or architects when they grew up — or that Indiana Jones was a real job, and they could’ve been that — instead of dedicated to this kind of abusive relationship with their readers.

But they put it aside, because they had a job to do — which was, on Tuesday, to lose sleep and gain weight from the quadrennial election night potluck and fry their brains with too many numbers to make sure all those people who hate them could wake up Wednesday morning knowing more than they knew when they went to bed.

A usual election is rough enough: Reluctantly harassing polite clerks who are as frazzled as you, hoping to get one more return to satisfy your howling editor. Poring over dozens of figures, thousands of digits, typing them into spreadsheets and reading them over twice, three times, four times to make sure they’re right.

But then you have elections like this year, when journalists had to break off from the usual madness to cover chaos at the absentee ballot counting center in Detroit or the weird software or human error that caused presidential returns to be flipped in Antrim County.

And then all those races coming in within an eyelash, and you watch the clock — 2 a.m., 3 a.m., on into Wednesday, into Thursday — and you realize your hope for a good night’s sleep are out the window, maybe even that vacation you planned to take next week to recover from election night.

In that environment, it’s enough to make you cry when you get a very courteous email from a reader who points out the lede to one of your online stories says voting is ongoing downstate, when you meant to say vote counting. You thank him for pointing out the error, make the fix online, make sure it shows up right in print, and get a reply from him that he understands the situation that led to the mistake, and he thanks you for keeping him informed.

The sheer decency of the missive makes you realize the world is not against you, and you’re ready for another day of battle.

Justin A. Hinkley can be reached at 989-358-5686 or jhinkley@thealpenanews.com. Follow him on Twitter @JustinHinkley.