Keeping TomDispatch Alive

In Deeply Troubled Times

Dear TomDispatch Reader,

Two years ago, when I was putting together the end-of-year plea I always post to keep TomDispatch going in a tough world, I wrote: “This time around though, I have to wonder whether it may be the last such missive I’ll write.” Well, as it happens (thanks to the generosity of the readers of this website), it wasn’t. Seven hundred thirty days later — the beginning of our 24th year and halfway through my own 80th year on this ever more embattled planet — I’m back, asking for your support.

Admittedly, there’s little I enjoy less at TomDispatch than bothering you for money (something I don’t enjoy when it happens to me). Still, you, the wonderful readers of this site, are now the only way I’m able to keep things going. The foundation money that I once regularly received disappeared with the death of the wonderful head of the Lannan Foundation, Patrick Lannan. And yet, I continue to be amazed because you really do make all the difference. You continue to ensure that, all these years later, I can focus on subjects that truly matter, whether we’re talking about the ever more dramatic overheating of this planet, this country’s unending and staggering support for a military that essentially can’t win a war, or the ongoing disaster in Gaza and much of the rest of the Middle East.

I mean, here I am, 24 years later, still managing a website that has long offered, at least as I see it, a take on our world that’s both all too sane and all too rare. I stumbled into doing this in the wake of the Bush administration’s disastrous post-9/11 decision to invade Afghanistan. (Didn’t any of them remember the Soviet experience of the previous century?) With it, they launched a catastrophic and all-too-global “war on terror” that has never quite ended.

When I look back on the last two decades-plus of TD pieces, including those by remarkable now-dead figures like Barbara Ehrenreich, Mike Davis, and Chalmers Johnson, I must say that I think this modest website has focused so much more incisively on what’s mattered in our world than mainstream sources of information. And this year has been no exception, whether you’re talking about William Astore (who has now written 109 pieces for TD!), Rebecca Gordon, Clarence Lusane, Andrea Mazzarino, Alfred McCoy, Liz Theoharis, Nick Turse, or… but let me not continue down a nearly endless list of superb writers. All I can say is: if those who matter in this country had paid any attention to TomDispatch, we might find ourselves on a different planet today. No such luck, of course.

Still, with all of that in mind, let me urge you once again to visit our donation page and do what you can to ensure that this site keeps on going into 2024, covering the issues that truly matter, or at least should matter, on this planet of ours. And since the one thing this old guy doesn’t do — I just don’t have the time! — is thank each of you personally for your donations (though I see them, one by one, as they come in and feel so deeply appreciative), let me thank you now. You don’t know how much each of you who has supported this website means to me. Put as simply as possible, I couldn’t have made it all these years without you. Not faintly! So, thanks beyond words…

My warmest regards,

Tom (Engelhardt)
TomDispatch.com