Many readers of this paper might not know it, but I more or less made my bones as a reporter by covering the collapse of the auto industry. For more than a year as a reporter at our sister paper, the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal, I covered Delphi’s slide into bankruptcy. The plant on Lower Mountain Road was, at the time, the largest employer in Niagara County with something like 4,000 jobs.

Slowly, but surely I wrote enough stories to see that number whittled down to below 1,500.

I wrote the stories the day that company filed for Chapter 11. My byline appeared below a 90-point single word headline, “BANKRUPT.”

As stories go, it was a good one for me. A reporter’s relationship with the news is funny like that. The cynical reality is that the worse the story is for someone else, the better it can be for us.

I wrote those stories — just like I’ve edited the ones here about General Motors — with a heavy heart. At my core, I am a byproduct of my environs, a blue-collar town where work ethic should, but rarely does, stand in balance with the size of one’s paycheck.

Of course the world isn’t that simple. Ask any of the millions of hard-working Americans who can’t find a job right now.

Generally speaking, my job as a newspaper columnist and editor is to make some sense of the day’s news. I struggle to do that on stories like the fall of General Motors in 2009.

There are the business realities. GM was a bad company that got by for longer than it deserved. It made cars that many Americans didn’t want. Its costs far outweighed its revenue. It paid its workers more than anyone else while selling fewer and fewer of the cars they made.

Those facts add up to a company going bankrupt. There’s no disputing it.

But as true as those simple facts are to a company’s bottom line, I’d point you to these facts:

Men and women were promised a standard of living when they agreed to give over 40 hours of their lives — often more — per week to the company. They came to work and punched a clock.

I am the son of a man who put in his 30 years. I saw the toll it took to, day after day, week after week, year after year, grind out a livelihood. Anyone who thinks these are easy jobs is dead wrong. There are many easier ways to make money than having two feet planted on a factory floor.

Needless to say, I have tremendous respect for the widget-makers of the world.

But those jobs are leaving. Soon they’ll be gone.

It isn’t easy for me to say this, but they have to go. It’s the natural order of things and the only way that America can exist in the 21st century.

This isn’t a manufacturing economy anymore. We make money by the high-speed transfer of information. The instruments of wealth aren’t things we hold in our hands. They are ideas — ideas made possible by technology that will solve problems, cure diseases, increase efficiency and help to smooth out the world’s rougher edges.

To compete, we must be more than the most industrious country on earth. We must also be the smartest. We must be the quickest. Our companies must be able to shift directions on a dime. The model of the dinosaur General Motors, which stumbled for decades before finally being forced to truly reform, will be an example of what not to do.

It will also be an example of how a company can ultimately squander its greatest resource — human capital. For all the cracks about well-fed auto workers, I firmly believe that the UAW’s past and present membership is, more than any segment of the workforce, responsible for making this the richest country in the world.

Had that workforce been better directed, better focused on the future rather than the preservation of the past, GM could have continued to serve as a model for excellence.

Instead, it stands as a case study in what went wrong during the chaos of 2009’s Great Recession.

When GM went bankrupt, 120,000 Americans found themselves out of a job at a GM factory or dealership. Think about all the husbands, wives and children who were effected and the number easily reaches into the millions hurt by this company’s fall from grace.

General Motors will never be what it once was, just like America will never be what it once was.

But that doesn’t mean it can’t be something better if we stop focusing on yesterday’s mistakes and start solving tomorrow’s problems.

Eric DuVall is the managing editor of the Tonawanda News. His column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Contact him at eric.duvall@tonawanda-news.com.