The Pros and Cons of Finding Your Voice

The ups and down of my public activism.

The Pros and Cons of Finding Your Voice

For most of my life, my writing was confined to business and personal matters. I’d write freelance articles for magazines and newspapers.

I’d write poems and love letters.

I’d write pieces for church publications.

As I reached the middle years, I found myself writing a lot of necessary, but unpleasant pieces. Newspaper death announcements for loved ones, and eulogies that I delivered at their funerals.

I hated writing those.

I am still writing about things I hate to write about.

I’d rather write about my faith, family life, marriage, fun stuff.

Anything other than what I end up writing about.

Racism, sexism, all the other horrible isms and phobias in the world.

I wanted to remain silent.

I really did. I don’t like putting my thoughts, feelings, opinions, emotions, etc. for other people to read.

But during the spate of extrajudicial police shootings, something changed inside of me.

Depending on your perspective, something either loosened or broke.

Perhaps a little bit of both.

First, I started writing about my personal experiences with racism.

People were overwhelmingly supportive. I guess it’s hard to contradict your life story.

Later, I began to share family experiences with prejudice.

The responses were still supportive.

It was when I began to share my opinions when I first faced opposition.

My writing was and is informed by fifty-plus years of living, my knowledge of history, my Christianity, and a lot of other factors.

I don’t expect to be agreed with by everyone I know and love.

I don’t expect everyone to understand how I think and feel about things. I certainly don’t understand why some people think and feel as they do.

I expected to get pushback and opposition.

What I didn’t expect is the type of disagreement I received from people who knew and sometimes said they loved me, as well as being supported and affirmed by people I’ve never met.

When I began to share my opinions, sometimes stridently, sometimes leavened with humor, often times using quotes and facts, I began receiving negative responses from people I didn’t know, and upon reflection, didn’t care to know.

That was easy to remedy.

Delete, unfriend, and block.

There were people I was close to who I knew would not agree with or like my comments. I wasn’t surprised when they responded negatively.

But at times, I was surprised by how negative their responses were.

They would respond to my posts without warning and launch into diatribes without sending a private message or wanting to have a genuine back-and-forth conversation.

I wouldn’t expect people I don’t know to take the time to sound me out privately before they became argumentative, but I did expect better of people who I considered friends and loved ones.

As it happens, even friends and loved ones can end up deleted, unfriended, and blocked, in real life as well as on social media.

A couple of examples come to mind.

One is a guy who was a friend. He and I served together on our church’s elder board. We met for breakfast and had great conversations.

When I started sharing opinions, he would respond to my posts at first, not agreeing, but in fairly measured words.

But he gradually became more pointed in his responses.

But the breaking point was when I wrote about Rush Limbaugh after he died.

That piece ended up causing me to delete, unfriend, and block a former coworker.

My friend’s posted response to my piece was “God doesn’t need to judge him because you already did.”

No phone call. No text. No warning.

Delete, unfriend, and block.

Another example is the wife of a former pastor of mine who disliked what I was saying about how complicit the church is in racism to the extent that she began sending me Facebook messages.

Very, very, long, very, very, critical Facebook messages.

I went back and forth with her for a while.

But when the last message she sent me caused my hand to cramp from scrolling to read it, I said “enough.”

Delete, unfriend, and block.

And don’t get the idea that this is a problem with Christians only. I’ve received equal opportunity attacks from people of all faiths and no faith, all colors - White, Black, you name it, I’ve got their written buckshot in my caboose.

(My philosophy about my social media posts is that posting on my page is my right and pleasure. If you post a comment on my page, you are doing so as a guest that has been invited into my house. If I invited you into my home, and you wiped your mouth on my tablecloth, burped in my face, and put your feet on my coffee table, I’m well within my rights to put you out of my house. The same principle applies to comments on my posts. If you are polite, you and your comments can remain. If you are rude, you will be shown to the virtual door and may the virtual doorknob hit you on the caboose on the way out.)

The flip side to the negativity is finding connection with people, people who are like-minded and whose worldview aligns with yours.

These people are also from different faiths or no faith, my color and other colors of the human rainbow, and represent a broad section of humanity.

I’m grateful when anything I write gives voice to someone’s thoughts and feelings. If I express something that helps and validates them, makes them think, my writing has not been in vain.

I’m also grateful that airing my thoughts and feelings has also validated my relationships with many old friends and loved ones.

And the relationship with some friends are works in progress. We are still navigating how to communicate with each other while disagreeing.

It has and will be difficult to write publicly about some important issues.

I never imagined how both beneficial and disappointing it would be.

But it’s still worth it, and always will be.