One of my adult kids wrote a blog about the situation in Gaza on one of the big left political blogs the other day and received a storm of responses. If it had been a real storm instead of a metaphorical one, she’d be under ten feet of water, I guess, but the Coast Guard would be on its way to rescue her. About a third of the responders were supporting what she had to say, another third opposing it, and the remaining third seemed to believe that she should never have said anything at all. I don’t know how Obama is going to produce his much-touted and fabulous coming together in the light of this kind of ‘conversation.’
In my twilight teaching days at UCLA, I was amazed by the students’ rather uniform contention that on matters that were not strictly factual (12 inches = one foot), everyone’s opinion was of equal value. It surely made teaching in the humanities and the social sciences a challenging experience, but I guess that is what we are in for in the foreseeable future. I once wrote a negative review of a book and its author was outraged that I disagreed with him. It's hard to know when you publish something whether you'd prefer to have people ignore you or disagree with you. It's unlikely they're just going to love what you say.
It’s only amplified by the new technology, of course, which fosters a kind of wildness. On the other hand, it’s that same new technology that has so many benefits for us, that keeps those of us in places like Point Roberts (oh, I know, there aren’t any places like Point Roberts) connected to ROTUS and to friends and family in ways we just couldn’t have been 20 years ago, even if you loved writing letters and wrote them all day long and had an endless supply of postage stamps. The New York Times, the other day, had an article about grandparents ‘videoconferencing’ with grandchildren. And for everything else, you have credit cards. So, on balance, I’d say, hooray for the technology and for the fact that it opens the conversation to everyone. My daughter, at comment 400, gave up trying to keep up with it. That’s another thing to remember about this brave new world: it’s well to know when to stop.
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I do recall, in my past life as a college art teacher, that I was only an art reviewer for our local newspaper (on Maui, in Hawaii, a decade ago) as long as I gave glowing, positive reviews. Just as soon as we (my husband and I wrote together) criticized some of the pieces in a major international art show, we were out of a "job". It had been mostly a volunteer gig anyway, but it did strike me at the time, that those in power did not really want to know what what we thought, they only wanted the extra publicity. It did seem that there were a lot of local folks listening however, as the attendance to that particular show (the work was French) was not very good. So we did not write too many more reviews I think, and then moved on in our lives anyway. But if I were to write reviews again, in some future life, I might think twice about being honest in my opinions. Good luck to your daughter and her blog efforts. Always enjoy your blog,
Rose
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