Archive for July, 2012

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Ideas Are Life

07/27/2012

The curse of living on an island is that it makes it easy to place limitations on ourselves. We have to worry that something said or done will insult the feelings of a distant relative or a friend of a friend. If you have an idea, these same people literally come out of the woodwork to give advice. Sometimes, I see the island mentality and think that it is impossible to overcome or that there’s no way to make a positive impact on set attitudes. These statements (based on personal experience) are rational but they are also statements that can be overcome.
I was taking part in a little self-pity the other day when this problem of island life popped into my head. I’ve been blogging steadily now for a few months and wondering why I had no more readers than when I started. The easy answer is that I live on an island and it’s hard to reach out to a wider audience because there isn’t much interaction with people outside my small circle of friends. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was just a rationalization. As with any situation, there are good points and bad options. The secret is to maximize the good and minimize the bad. This might seem obvious but, when you’re in a little slump, the obvious is rarely self-evident!
So I sat down and made a list of the good and bad things about island living. In my list, I tried to be honest about what were my failings and what as due to my environment. As I mentioned above, readership can’t be blamed on where I am because my writing isn’t specific to where I live and I intentionally try to use broad themes that can apply to people everywhere. The next step was a review of past posts to see if they sucked. This obviously isn’t the time for false modesty so, in re-reading them, I was confident that they said what I meant and were in a style that I was comfortable with.
I’d had a conversation with a friend about my posts and he suggested that I was too bland. In my re-reading, I did notice that I do have a casual style of writing but I certainly don’t feel it’s bland. I’m topical, I put as much of myself into the writing as possible, and I try to be humorous. I was pretty sure that the themes I chose were engaging until my last post on the Aurora shooting. The number of readers suddenly increased and there were comments being posted. From those comments, I realized that nothing galvanizes resolve more than a divisive issue like guns. What I also realized was that people tend to read with a pre-conceived agenda in their head.
If my post had contained nothing more that one sentence saying, “I’m in favor of taking away guns from everyone in the U.S.”, I couldn’t have gotten a more visceral reaction. Of course, if you had read all the words, you wouldn’t have found that nor the theme in my writing. I had found a way to increase readership but it wasn’t a method that I liked.
For me, ideas and their exposition are life. When I see or read about things that enrich or shortchange the tapestry of our lives, I want to write about them. I want to describe the situation and explain how it affects me. If the ideas are engaging to others, readers will return. In the context of my problems with living on an island, I also find that the smaller audience provides an incubator of sorts where I can talk about issues that face our island and maybe more directly affect the audience
As for the concept that more readers somehow implies that my writing is better, I reject that notion. For all of you who do read regularly, I hope you do come back. And, if you do or don’t agree with something I’ve said, please post a comment. If you really like it, please share the link.

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Norwegian Wood – Like an Oak

07/23/2012

It’s been a year since the deadly shooting in Norway by a deranged ultra-rightist claiming he was killing brainwashed children. To mark the anniversary, survivors, family members of the victims, and government officials gathered on the small island where most of the victims died. What I found most amazing was that (in an article) there was no finger-pointing or calls for retribution. There just seems to have been a fierce resolve that the incident will not deter them from their societal goals of openness and a feeling of safety. I was especially heartened by the quote by their Prime Minister, “By meeting blind hatred with knowledge and reason, we have shown that democracy is stronger than its biggest threat.”

Norway, like many countries around the world, is attempting to deal with the an influx of Muslims. The killer claimed that he was killing people who he thought were advancing policies that didn’t protect the pureness of Norwegian blood by allowing Muslims to live in Norway.

What really impressed me was their sense of optimism. If this had happened in the U.S., groups from across the political spectrum would have exploded with rhetoric designed to exploit the situation to their point of view. Heated debates would have ensued with incendiary language on all sides. Instead, the Norwegians have been able to keep their focus on the values they hold dear and soldier on in the face of tragedy.

We live in a world where darkness and evil can be found all around, if you look. It isn’t that these people are turning a blind eye to the problems out there but rather, they are using the power of optimism to build and maintain their society.  At a mass for the victims, the bishop said, “The light shines in the darkness; darkness hasn’t been able to overcome it.”

Maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here.

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