Sometimes when Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey got up to speak I would hold my breath. She’s not a smooth talker, sometimes speaking haltingly like she’s trying to gather her thoughts. But as tentative as she could be in her delivery, she was always strong in her convictions.

Still, I’m happy about Lynn announcing this week that she will not run for an 11th term in the House of Representatives. For one reason. She can cut back on the speech-making and the mocking of her fumbles by media critics. One of her supporters standing next to me when Lynn made her announcement said, “Can you imagine taking on a job where half of it required you to do something you hated doing and knew you weren’t very good at?”

That was about the time the coastal California wind swept through Lynn’s Petaluma backyard, tangled her speech notes, she lost track of what she was about to say, then shrugged and said, “Well, you know.”

Smooth talking is definitely an asset in politics but it isn’t everything. Washington is full of silver tongued slicks in a suit. Dick Cheney is good with words. Anthony Weiner was a definite wit.

Actually Lynn does quite ably in one-on-one talks. Rachel Maddow closed one interview with Lynn, saying, “always a pleasure to hear your straight talk, Ma’m.”

Yes, straight talk. Not flowery. Not clever. Not mean. No winky-winks.

And always a brave heart. In doing exactly what her constituents wanted. Never wavering.

Lynn has opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and American involvement in Libya. She’s delivered nearly 400 speeches on the House floor in support of bringing U.S. troops home. She voted against the USA Patriot Act, saying that it recklessly violated civil liberties. She once proposed the government establish a Department of Peace with cabinet status. In 2006, she gave antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan a ticket to George Bush’s State of the Union speech.

She initially voted against the $700 billion financial bailout because she said it wouldn’t do enough to provide jobs. She pushed for a stronger public health care option than was eventually adopted in the Affordable Care Act and waited quietly while rowdies at a town hall meeting in Petaluma shouted her down when she said, “our health care system is broken.”

Nancy Pelosi has called her the “conscience of the Congress.”

Lynn went to Washington when she was 55 in 1992, the famous Year of the Women when a record number of women joined the House and Senate. It was not lost on those who gathered in Lynn’s back yard that coincidentally the same day she announced she would be leaving Congress another congresswoman, from Minnesota, announced her bid for president, even though about the only things the two have in common is their gender and their job title.

For example, Lynn Woolsey fought against privatizing Social Security when George W. proposed it. Now Lynn is re-engaged in the current Republican assault on Social Security. The Minnesota Congresswoman has bragged that were her GOP crowd in control they could get rid of Social Security over one long weekend.

Lynn’s good pal and colleague Congresswoman Barbara Lee credits Lynn for never being shy about connecting her personal experiences to her political beliefs. Lynn is the first member of Congress to have once been a single mother on welfare, so of course she supports social safety nets. When you ask her about choice she tells the story about her grandmother, pregnant with her first child and almost to term when something went wrong and the doctor told her husband there was no way to save both his wife and the baby. And he chose his wife. And two years later Lynn’s mother was born.

Lynn, who has promised to continue her anti-war efforts and work to protect the California coast from offshore oil drilling, is the real thing. Nancy Pelosi has called her the “conscience of the Congress.”

That’s certainly worth more than glib talk from suits in wingtips.

I didn’t even know that Juan Williams was a regular commentator on Fox News and so when I first heard about his Muslim comment I thought, “What in the heck are you doing talking to Bill O’Reilly?”

When it comes to profiling, I do it with anyone affiliated with Fox. I think they have a Republican Obama-bashing bias. So, I couldn’t imagine why an established journalist and author, who I identify with NPR, which I believe is pretty even-handed, would want to hang out at Fox.

Full disclosure here: I do commentary for the local NPR affiliate. I don’t get paid. I did once get a check from the national NPR, I think for $200, for a commentary on weapons of mass destruction that aired on NPR’s Sunday Morning show.

Now that I’ve been reading up on the curious case of Juan Williams, I think he was unwise to get in a discussion with Bill O’Reilly about Muslims, considering that O’Reilly was trying to rebut the blasting he took after saying, “Muslims killed us on 9/11” on “The View” TV show. Williams commented that he gets worried when he’s on a plane and sees passengers in “Muslim garb.” I still don’t know what he means by Muslim garb? Is it a woman in a headscarf? What do Muslim men wear?

What a big bowl of mush journalism has become.

The guidelines used to be pretty cut and dried. Journalists reported news. In the third person – “he said, she said” – manner. You didn’t know what the reporter personally thought from reading the story because an editor would fish out any hint of opinion like a waiter plucking a hair from the soup.

Columnists were the ones with opinions. They could write in the first person. But even if you were paid to have an opinion it was not okay to be inflammatory or write something that would make you and your employer look like a jerk.

When I was a newspaper staff writer I was both a columnist and a reporter which was a tricky combo. I had to be careful not to column-ize on the same subject I was reporting on. For example, I could not cover an anti-abortion rally or a pro-choice rally as a reporter because my columns clearly revealed my stand on reproductive rights.

Sometimes conflict was suspected when it didn’t exist. One editor thought I showed bias when I I wrote a feature story on anniversary celebrations of women’s suffrage and also walked in a suffrage parade with friends. How could that be a conflict, I had to ask. Is there anyone out there from 1920 still protesting the 19th amendment?

Most traditional news organizations had ethics codes which kept journalists from attending political rallies, unless they were covering them. Journalists were not to post candidate signs in their yards, sign petitions or go to crab feeds sponsored by a political party.

There are different standards for old media, new media, social media. For professional journalists and citizen journalists. Facebook and blogs are all about opinions. It’s no wonder the public doesn’t get why Williams was canned for expressing his opinion.

I am sorry that the NPR boss fired Williams instead of calling a meeting to say, “This moonlighting job isn’t working, man. You gotta choose.” I’m sorry that an angry Williams has trashed the organization which helped make his career. And I’m very sorry that O’Reilly has any excuse to go after public radio.

But that’s only my opinion. Now can we get back to baseball?

DEAR READER,
I don’t know where you are in this retirement experience – enjoying it, dreading it, denying you’re in it, can’t wait for it? But if you’re like me you definitely find it puzzling. Which is what I’ll be writing about from time to time in My So-Called Retirement. I hope you weigh in because as always, when it comes to change and challenge, we need each other’s help.

I used to sympathize with my friends who didn’t work but stayed home and raised kids and who dreaded the “What do you do?” question at parties. Their answer “I’m a mom,” would get them little but a polite smile from others who would then turn to scan the crowd for someone more interesting.

I could argue on behalf of those women that anyone who didn’t respect the hard job of being a mother wasn’t worth talking to. I, too, was a mother, and I was on their side.

But I was on the other side, too. I didn’t have to avoid the question at parties. I, in fact, looked forward to it. I had a better answer. And did that make me feel a little bit superior? Sure.

“I’m a newspaper reporter,” I said and later, down the road, I could add the even sexier, “I’m a columnist.” That usually got their attention. If a person recognized my name they might try to be flattering and mention something I’d written. Or they might become a little antagonistic, like the guy who said he liked my writing except for when I sounded like a feminist. Sometimes a person would use me as their chance to rant about the media. But they never just turned away.

I was advised by a friend to never answer “retired” when asked what I did.

When I first left my regular newspaper job more than a year ago, I was advised by a friend to never answer “retired” when asked what I did. “Tell them you do something,” she said. “It makes you seem young.”

That’s part of it, isn’t it? To say you’re retired creates an image attached to an age (old), a lifestyle (sedentary) and value (past). People envy retired people their time, but not their standing.

My generation of women (the Boomer vanguard) was the first to swarm into the workplace in a big way. We were educated women, trained for careers that came with a business card and status. Then, after 30 or 40 years of it, we stopped doing it. Maybe we had no choice because someone said it’s time to go. Or maybe, like for me, we chose to go. The newspaper business was in a downward dive when I left. It had stopped being fun, and to tell you the truth I wanted to exit before someone decided to take away my column and force me to write cops and robbers or spend weekends covering some NASCAR race.

When people ask me what I do now, I say “writer.” And if they say, “I thought you retired,” I start explaining that just because I no longer go into a newsroom every day and just because I get a pension doesn’t mean I’m actually retired. At least not in the classic sense. I’m doing it my way and I’ll tell them more once I figure it out.

People envy retired people their time, but not their standing.

I was at the beach with my dog and spotted a woman I had once interviewed for the paper. She had been a college instructor and I asked her how it was going and she said she’s never been happier since retiring. And what, I inquired, does she answer when people ask what she’s doing now. “I say I’m just being,” she said.

Now, this woman is at a point where I am not. She looked regal, her long silver blonde hair twisting in the sea breeze, a black poncho wrapped around her tall lean frame. When she and her elegant dog trotted off down the beach I pulled my dog off a rotting seagull and thought, well, there’s a role model. I never thought about “just being.”

Susan Swartz is an author and journalist in Sebastopol, Ca. You can also read her at www.juicytomatoes.com and hear her Another Voice commentary on KRCB-FM radio on Fridays. Email is susan@juicytomatoes.com