It’s been too long since I popped in here. I’ve been blogging in my head, though. Loads of things have come up that I have wanted to talk about but either a lack of time or a lack of fortitude have stopped me from transferring those thoughts online.
Among those things were:
Empowerment. If you have to wait to be empowered – like is often said of people in what is termed Africa Plus (Africa plus the other super-poor countries which are African in all but geography e.g. Haiti)…if you have to wait for someone else to empower you, are you really empowered at all? The comedian Chris Rock, who I find myself wanting to quote a lot whenever social justice issues come up, crystallized it perfectly when talking about the difference between being “rich” and being “wealthy”. The basketball player (I know – basketball – yawn…) LeBron James is rich. I have no idea how rich. But as one of the most high profile sportsmen in the US, and therefore, by extension, in the world, he is a rich man. The guy who pays LeBron James, however is wealthy. He is the empowerer (assuming that money equates to empowerment – which, for the purposes of this example, it does).
That being the case, are any of us really empowered? Or is there always someone one step above, who can either make us or break us? Even, Barack Obama. Leader of the free world, president of the world’s only superpower blah, blah etc. etc. someone put him there. I’m not talking about the voters, either. I’m talking about all the background machinations that must surely be in effect to place and maintain someone in a seat of such awesome power. When I think it through, the maze of who empowers whom is vast and convoluted and I just can’t have that swirling around in my mind for too long so I think the idea is there are levels of empowerment but really, at the end of it, no matter how high up the chain you are, there will always be someone / something pulling your strings. Always.
Then I was thinking about how there is a finite amount of everything in the world. Happiness. Beauty. Wealth. Kindness. Luck. You name it. Everything. I think I came to this realization because it became too hard to keep on asking why things happen. For the Fontanians, I have had to do a lot of reading about life in Zimbabwe. A lot. I cannot have live conversations about it because people are too terrified to speak out, so instead I read about it. I read as many news sources as I can. Local ones, international ones. Objective ones. Biased ones. Good ones, horrendous ones. I read and I read and then I read some more. Then, when I’m done reading, I want to ask God why. How can that be allowed to happen? One man with 27 houses, fleets of luxury cars, villas in the most exclusive destinations around the globe. Another, from the same country, possibly even with the same level of education, withered and decrepit. Drenched in despair and festering in his own feces. And the best he can hope for is an accelerated death. Have you read the stories about Zimbabwean prisoners sharing cells with corpses of inmates who have long died of malnourishment and abuse? I can’t ask why anymore. So I have figured out the answer for myself. It’s because on Planet Earth there is a finite amount of everything.
A Hollywood celebrity might flagrantly violate dozens of laws, numerous times and get away with it. He might even molest a young child or commit murder. He’ll likely get a book deal or a hit movie out if it. When this happens, somewhere, on the other side of the world there is a gay man, who might hold hands with, or kiss, his partner in public and he will be stoned to death for it. Why? Because the Hollywood guy used up all the good fortune. The lucky breaks. The justice. Whatever you want to call it. Extreme examples, maybe, but they happen. Think of the imbalances that are everywhere. if there is raging excess in one place, there must be rampant deprivation elsewhere. Usually, when I figure out a truth of this magnitude, it makes me feel better about myself. A feeling of “Ah! There it is…there’s the logic.” Yet in this case it just made me feel kinda deflated.
Deep breath…
And then I was thinking about what makes people comment on blogs. This blog, for anyone who has been reading from the very beginning, started when I went full time freelance at the beginning of 2009 – as a way for me to aggregate content. Before that, I was freelancing part-time. You may wonder why I talk a lot about shoes and being single and how I think that few things are more important than good grammar and spell-checking documents. Well, because that is what I think about – a lot. And in this blog , I adhere to the truism: Better to write for yourself and have no readers, than to write for your readers and have no self (I think I’m paraphrasing a little bit there but you get the point.) The point being that I write this blog for me and tend not to really publicize it. Not because I am ashamed of anything I write but because it is a conversation with myself. Because that is one of the things I miss most of all about life in Shanghai – conversation that goes beyond the superficial level.
But back to the commenting thing, having started http://www.fontanians.com, I have had to flip my blogging philosophy around completely – I do have to write for the readers and engage them and there should really be very little of myself as “Iris” in there. And, so, how to I take the site from being something that is commented on by my friends and family because they want to be supportive, to something that provokes ideas and draws comments because the issues it covers are engaging and discussion-worthy?
There are about a billion links to sites that give you advice on this. It’s too much information. A lot of it is just common sense. Some of it pure guess work. And a big chunk of it is completely without substantiation.
And then yesterday, someone who was neither a friend nor a relative commented on the blog. I was very excited when I got the alert. Only to read that the comment was basically: “This is crap, were you high when you wrote it “. Again, I paraphrase, but that was the gist of it. Understandably this was not my favorite comment but I let it through moderation anyway because I did not want it to appear that only people who were complimentary got their feedback featured. Then a few minutes passed and I thought – Ok, I’ll answer him to show that I am not rising to the bait or sulking because he didn’t write “Rah! Rah!” – so I responded. Then someone I know, a friend, commented on his comment and I thought: Oh no – this fellow has totally derailed what I was hoping the conversation would be about – the content of the article I had posted, rather than the style in which it was written. So I deleted his initial comment.
But still. What makes people comment on blogs?
I don’t like Japanese food. I really don’t. I find it dry, bland and a complete waste of a night out if anyone ever does suggest I spend the evening having dinner in a Japanese restaurant. But you see, I bet you never knew that I didn’t like Japanese food because, if you find something unfit for your consumption, whether it be media – like a blog – or food – Japanese – doesn’t it make sense to signify your lack of appreciation by completely ignoring it ? not giving Japanese restaurants my patronage, in my case. Or bypassing the blog, not linking to it, nor commenting on it, in the case of yesterday’s guy? In the same way I certainly wouldn’t trundle along to my local teppanyaki joint and scream: “This is rubbish, why do you even bother!?”, why would anyone who read something on the net that they didn’t enjoy post “Oh, I didn’t enjoy this, Crackhead”? It makes no sense to me. I don’t see the value. Sure, you don’t like it, but the Internet is a big, fat, creepy place, why not just take yourself to a URL where your sensibilities won’t be offended?
Good Lord, this post is long. This is what happens when one stays away for over three weeks.
