Follow the paper trails

“I know it's impossible for you to see your peers this way, but when you're older, you start to see them--the bad kids and the good kids and all kids--as people. They're just people, who deserve to be cared for.” ― Paper Towns

I read this amazing thing a journalist wrote about paper trails. The idea was that we are all leaving trails - birth certificates, identity cards, school certificates, district records, college applications, university letters of acceptances or rejections, postcards, certificates to announce your marriage and everything else. Someday an obituary, perhaps. That idea is scary of course but for journalism it's supposed to be this cool way of remembering history, people, and what happened where.

I was born in London, Ontario. My birth certificate tells you that. It cant tell you that the only place I've ever called home is Karachi. But it can give you something to start with. You can humanize me, understand me, and perhaps someday see yourself in me. 

Sometimes people leave trails they don't intend on leaving. Some "journalists" rummage through bins belonging to popular writers - I'm thinking of you, Jo - and try to figure out what story they can break from that crumpled paper and discarded material. 

The papers that document are lives are ones that you learn to appreciate the older you grow. You leave these trails and you worry about you'll be tracked down and given little privacy. On the flip side, you're able to figure out the way back to where you started from.

In class we were assigned a task to write a story that uses a document as a primary source. Mine is on the ACLU vs Clapper case where basically people who represent civil liberties organisations are suing NSA. With stories like these, finding human sources is hard. Not everyone is comfortable speaking on record. Those who are ok with doing so are usually from that community of activists who have just stopped caring about making those in power uncomfortable. Either that, or they somehow feel protected by the community they are part of. That at least these people will make noise if they are missing, being threatened, attacked, vilified, or killed.

"Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You can see how fake it all is. It's not even hard enough to be made out of plastic. It's a paper town. I mean, look at it, Q: look at all those culs-de-sac, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm."― Paper Towns