Over the past few days, jclifford and I have been expressing dismay over the cloud of complacency that seems to have settled over American society. What would have driven people onto the streets in years past seems lately to elicit little more than a “ho-hum.”
Of course, the direction of “American society” is an aggregation of the active choices by people who are in American society. That’s you and me; if we choose to be active, then the complacency of “American society” will be a thing of the past.
But how to act? There are a lot of things you can do, some of them simple and some of them difficult. Here’s a simple thing you can do, but a thing that’s very important:
Write your local media.
This can be a letter to the editor or a letter to a particular reporter. These letters are often read, and I’ve found yet again in the last few days that they can have an effect. Earlier this week, I complained here that George Bush’s Education Department had officially released but unofficially hidden a report finding no difference between public schools and private schools’ test scores for comparable students. But I didn’t just note it here: I wrote a pithy letter to the editor of my local paper on the issue to boot. Sometimes my letters to the editor get published, in which case my words help to make a bit of a public case and maybe move the terms of debate just a bit. This time, my letter didn’t get published. But it was forwarded on to a reporter at the paper who had reported on the topic. She wrote back to me, sharing the response she had gotten from the government on the issue. I in turn wrote back with a few tidbits of information undermining the government’s line. She wrote back… and we had a nice, civil, productive dialogue, ending with her indication that she would be looking for more government reports stuffed in dark corners.
My experience shows you don’t have to be a big-time muckety-muck in order to have an impact on the direction of reporting in a publication. You just need to be an interested reader with questions or comments. Those little pieces of communication help construct reporters’ notions of what their readers are interested in and want to see in the newspaper. And those notions in turn shape what comes out in a paper that’s read by thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of people.
Of course, people who read this blog tend to be politically active already, and so maybe I’m just preaching to the choir. If so, then let me just say thanks for doing what you do. But if it’s been a while since you put pen to paper (or finger to keyboard), let today be the day you get back in the habit. Writing your paper or news station is one way to bring on a new era of revived activism.
You’ll have to pardon me. I’m off to practice what I just preached. Hmm. “Dear editor…”
