I’ve come across a lot of writers who say they don’t care if they never
get published or achieve fame; that they write because they love it. There’s no
right or wrong about it, but one thing is for sure: if you keep the product of
your creativity private you also never expose yourself to sticks and stones.
You never have to grapple with the ugliest and most persecuting of rejections.
But if you’re driven, for whatever reason, to be visible you have to gird your loins. Because some of the people who see you
will be filled with repressed rage and just looking for a target to hurl their
ugly missiles at.
Oddly, it doesn’t matter who you are or what you’re doing. Even if you’re an exceptional human being it doesn’t
make you less of a target. Take Barack Obama, an unusually balanced man; he wouldn’t
have been able to keep his focus if he wasn’t, given the rotting garbage (and
let’s face, repressed rage is rotting garbage) that’s thrown at him and the
conservative wall of resistance that showed its ugly face as soon as he was
elected. Resistance that had and has nothing to do with him as a person and
everything to do with the color of his skin. It’s not just
passionate resistance, it’s ugly, underhanded and explosive. I had a tiny, tiny taste of
it aimed at me the other day with a comment on my last post.
"YOU pay for a third US war in the
Mid East, bitch. You have some sort of moronic hero worship of Obama, who wants
to throw seniors in the US out to die, using the US budget deficit to justify
his particular form of genocide. You live in a rich country. There are many
rich countries in the world. The US is now a poor country, full of poor and
unemployed people. It is selfish and greedy of you to want the US and its
people who will never see as much money as you live on in a month, to sacrifice
even more when the rest of you sacrifice NOTHING."
Nothing balanced about that comment. I’m not sure which country this
person thinks I live in, or what my income is, or how they came to their
conclusions, that I’m moronic and super-wealthy. I know that nothing about any
of it is factual.
It wasn’t pleasant to get that bit of emotional acid thrown at my face,
although it didn’t hurt as much as, possibly, the author hoped it would. I was
more unsettled by the twisted and distorted perspective of Barack Obama - genocide? - and the state that the US was
in when he was elected. But that’s par for the course with his detractors;
ignoring the truth and one aspect about life that nobody has any power at all
to change: cause and effect. A president who comes into power when a country is
sliding towards another Great Depression didn’t cause it. He inherited it.
Barack Obama has rescued the US from a fate that everybody thought was
cast in stone. Whether he gets acknowledgement for it or not doesn’t alter the
truth of that.
I haven’t enabled the comment on the post, because I wanted the author
of it to have their very own spotlighted page. Unfortunately I can’t
congratulate them personally on their brilliant mind and balanced perspective or
thank them for their contribution to World Truth because, of course, they
posted as ‘anonymous’.
