Friday Night at 8: New Year’s Bloggytalk

Well I don’t have a lot to say tonight — but given my proclivities, I’m sure I’ll use a lot of words anyway.

I’ve had a tough couple of blogging weeks.  Mostly dealing with the issue of public housing in New Orleans.  ‘Course I also got in some scathing comments on a couple of immigration diaries.  Oddly, some of my enemies and I are beginning to acquire a bizarre form of camaraderie.  Ah, familiarity breeds a whole lot of things, it seems.

It wasn’t so much that I was fighting folks as struggling to communicate, which was frustrating.  Nightprowlkitty, SuperKitty of Justice(!) does not LIKE to be patient!  Seems, though, that patience is a requirement.

ek hornbeck has, though his writing, helped me enormously when it comes to another quality I have found is necessary if one is to engage in the dirty work of real communication of ideas and information and values – often to folks who may not know or trust me – and that is toughness.

To illustrate this helpfulness, I shall link a comment and response from one of his issues of the Stars Hollow Gazette.  I had commented one needs toughness to “save the internets” and his response has become my new mantra for 2008:

You can’t expect that people will treat you in any particular way.

That sounds simple, but I have found when blogging about social justice, be it public housing in New Orleans, inhumane treatment of undocumented workers, weakening of labor and civil rights laws, any of those kinds of things, my writing sometimes hits hot buttons in the minds of those who read it.  So I will sometimes get comments in my essays or responses to my comments that have virtually nothing to do with what I have written about — but has everything to do with the reader’s perceptions and their own passions.

And thus the battle for communication begins.  Sometimes it’s just rejection on both sides, although in one or two cases, several weeks or a couple of months later, there is some engagement, if we both return to the subject when someone else writes an essay about it.  Other times, though rarely, heh, there is a really good argument (in the classic sense of the word) where both of us gain from the engagement.  There’s fights, reversals, betrayals, and above all, bloviation.  It is what I call “trench blogging.”  I am not an expert of any kind, so I have no real authority.  I stand or fall on my own merits.  I have to say, I like that.

My ego is useless in these kinds of communications.  If I get praised, I forget what I’m fighting for and start preening immediately.  If I get slammed my pride rears up in wounded gusts of hot air outrage and, again, I forget what I’m fighting for.  So it’s always helpful, if possible, to leave the ego out of the discussion.

And of course, expectation has so much to do with that.  Can’t get either mad or vain if you’re sticking to what is important to you and not preening in the mirror somewhere waiting to be told you are fabulous.

When I can do that, I find enormous satisfaction in the give and take of real dialogue.  Woo hoo!

So this is my mantra for 2008.  I have seen all the writers here at Docudharma evolve and begin to find what you want to write about.  I think we’ve all agreed that compassion is a requirement (buhdy says!).   And I also think toughness is a requirement as well.  I’m sure there are others, but I’m not going to go all meta here.  I’m talking about blogging only for myself, in the area of social justice (and oh sweet lord I also hope that in 2008 I’ll find a better term than “social justice,” which just reminds me of damp flannel or something, gag).

So voila!  I shall end by repeating my new mantra (and of course, if anyone  has ever done mantras, you know they’re repeated over and over again):

You can’t expect that people will treat you in any particular way.

As proprietress of  the weekly series, Friday Night at 8, I wish all the Docudharmaniacs a very Happy New Year.