Once upon a Macintosh too big for a millennial to comprehend, I transcribed the stats of those sent to slaughter.
My first job in journalism had landed me at the Lewis County Herald. I was 18. I was paid with a class credit and a subscription to this paper based in Vanceburg, Ky., population 1500, a rural river-town. And every week, one of my most important duties was to type out the Stockyard Report — a series of numbers and statistics measuring the prized cattle raised, poked, prodded, sold and perhaps celebrated as a great deal before becoming a slab of meat hanging in a slaughterhouse, somewhere.