From the Editors: September 2024

Jessica Hunter

I've often said — to my children, to myself when I make a mistake, to my husband when he loads the dishwasher, etc. — that learning is the whole point of life. Growth, empathy, understanding, change — those all come from constantly learning and adapting to new information. With learning also comes humility, and the ability to accept that we're wrong, to move forward with new faculty, and actually change our behavior accordingly. It is a challenge to the ego, and the best of us are able to recognize that and move forward. This can be small — a child learning that words matter and can hurt. This can be big — like acknowledging that children (or really anyone) having easy access to weapons of war is not in the best interest of our children's mental health or physical safety.

If a child grows up having never learned that words matter and can hurt, they become that anonymous (adult) Facebook commenter who, not taking into consideration the hurt their words cause, contributes to making a child feel like the school that they attend somehow makes them a bad person. Within the pages of this issue, we will take a look at Erie High School, the only fully public high school serving our city's teenagers, and one that is working, alongside the United Way of Erie County, to raise the self-esteem of and school pride in their students — to help them learn that they are doing great things and that their future matters.

We'd also be remiss if we didn't take this opportunity to have a bit of a teaching moment. While the Erie Reader is and always will be free for anyone to read, in understanding the spirit of that freeness, we ask that you don't take more copies than you need, please. Whether you agree with what we print or not, making off with, say, "hundreds of copies" because one's fragile ego can't cope with a writer's opinion, is not in the spirit of free circulation. Sometimes simple ideas that seem obvious to everyone else need to be spelled out. We're happy to help.

Segue to election season, where we are all presented with plenty of opportunities to learn, and more importantly, to change course. It's okay to change your mind, to let go of whatever beliefs you felt defined yourself as a person. It's okay to say, "Actually, this doesn't really make sense for me anymore. I was wrong and now I'm going to choose a different path." Say it over and over again, like a mantra. You'll find it will get easier the more you say it, I promise. That's what learning, and hence, what life is all about.