Dear Activists, Politicians and News Pundits

Dear Friend,

While I'm on this letter writing kick, I decided just this morning to write a letter to my fellow activists, our political representatives, and to news pundits in general. I want to say I wrote these letters in a good-faith effort to suggest alternatives to the hate-filled rhetoric that taints our discourse, degrades our relationships, and turns the truth on its head. As I reread them, however, it's clear that in writing the second letter (to pundits and politicians) I just sound exasperated. This is because I'm exasperated. In any case, can I run some sample letters by you? Perhaps in some ways I speak for both of us.

Love, Sar

Dear passionate, outspoken Activist,

You sound angry. So angry.

Good. Good, and thank you. Thank you for the strength of your convictions, your care and concern, your work. Whether you're marching in the streets, organizing at a grassroots level, writing letters to the editor, or creating content for social media, we need your anger. More than your anger, we need your rage. Rage is welcome here, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. In an unjust world, rage is holy. It is vital. We must not be afraid of it.

Neither, of course, must we be consumed by it. Our rage can fuel our actions, but only in a controlled and disciplined way. Change comes slowly. You know this better than anyone, and we're in it for the long haul. Uncontrolled rage doesn't help us in this regard; like fire, it burns hot and flames out quickly, though not before destroying everything in its path. For the record, I'm not a fan of destroying everything in our path. When it comes to individuals and institutions that harm folks, we must STOP THEM. We must pick them apart, expose them, turn them inside out, dismantle and, ultimately, change them. But burning them to the ground – or even threatening to – creates so much fear, chaos, and backlash that we lose precious time in the long run and bring harm in equal and opposite ways. We must be smarter and better than that. We must put down our guns and vitriol and take up our pens and stories (for instance) instead.

The world we’ve created can be terrible, terrifying, violent, and unjust. People living on the margins are at risk. To be clear, I am not one of them, and I have friends who would argue that it’s easy for me to say we must set aside our vitriol. My friends have a point. Nonetheless, gently and respectfully, I submit the following for your consideration: if your movement is deliberately nourished by hatred and violence, even if you deem both justifiable, your movement is leaking power, the very power desperately needed to bring about real and lasting change.

Love,

Sara

Dear news pundits:

Many of you, on both sides of the divide (some of you way more than others), have given up any pretense of academic objectivity, forcing us, instead, to dine on one sneering opinion piece after another. You could have prevented our descent into post-truth America, but you chose clickbait and ratings instead. Either that or you gave yourself (and the rest of us) a false, binary choice: sneering outrage or feeble bothsidesing. You will most certainly go to journalistic hell for this, which I’ll feel mildly sad about. You had such potential.

Dear politicians (not including the stateswomen and statesmen in the halls of Congress working quietly and diligently every day to “do right” by the American people):

When it comes to my fellow citizens, I go out of my way to speak in measured tones, listen more than I talk, and seek first to understand. Speaking truth to power, however, is a different exercise. Power is a consequential thing. You have it, you’re using it, and you need unmitigated feedback in real time. Allow me to offer up some.

We live in a pluralistic society. Given that you have risen to certain heights, I will assume you understand what that means. I will assume you know what it means to live in a Democracy, in which people have wildly different ideas and ideals about how best to govern and to live. I’m also going to assume (despite evidence to the contrary) that you recognize the fact that, by definition, people within a Democracy can and must coexist. What I will not assume is that you give a shit. In a story as old as time, you have chosen power, again, and again, over doing the right thing. The road to hell is not always paved with good intentions.

I will remind you that this behavior comes at a cost.

Love,

Sara