Why We Can’t Be Complacent, or What is My Responsibility as a Writer

I’m not going to lie, the last couple of days have been hard on me, and this post is a little heavier because of it. I’ve had the respiratory virus that’s going around, and that triggered my MS, and I sprained my back right before Valentine’s Day, so I’ve been kind of motionless. The school shooting on Valentine’s Day killed seventeen people, mostly kids. The passing of a bill in the mostly Republican House that would dismantle the ADA – protections for disabled people – people like me. I take that as a personal attack, not only on me, but on everyone a little different. I recall that the Nazis started by quietly killing off disabled people. A country that keeps saying that disabled veterans are a priority but taking away their benefits, even the ramps for their wheelchairs, is messed up. A country’s President that says he cares about mental illness and school safety but defunds both, and besides that, changes the law so that mentally ill people can buy guns more easily. The hypocrisy, and evil, that is taking place in front of our eyes if we keep them open – how can we respond?

But you might say, beyond voting, calling our reps, or donating money to a good cause, what can we really do? The lobbies of hotel corporations who do not want to have to build ramps for wheelchairs or the NRA who does not want the politicians it gives money to to vote against, say, a seventeen year old kid with a history of abusing his girlfriend and threatening to shoot classmates the ability to buy an assault rifle, then what can we regular folks, not politicians or lobbyists or people with big money, do about it?

Well, I am a writer. I can write about the things that make me angry, afraid, sad about how our country is acting. I can be (gasp) political, even if I do not feel especially comfortable writing political things. Here are some facts about me that influence my belief system and of course how I write. I was raised in Knoxville and Cincinnati, two bastions of conservative conservatives, but feel much more at home here in the artistic and more liberal Pacific Northwest. I learned how to shoot a rifle when I was seven years old, and I owned my own gun up until about ten years ago. I was six when I was raped. I became a Christian after reading the Bible when I was 12 and it helped me recover from a life-threatening suicidal anorexia. I have been in and out of wheelchairs for about nine years, and have been diagnosed with, among other things, a rare bleeding disorder, a bunch of odd and life-threatening allergies, a horseshoe kidney, liver tumors that may or may not be cancer (still doing tests), and a bunch of brain lesions from MS.

I tell you these things for a reason. They all impact what I choose to write, and how I write about it. All these things, these truths we can choose (or choose not to) tell, affect how we see the world. Are guns dangerous? Are all Christians intolerant? Should we build government buildings that include ramps, or protect the jobs of people with different abilities?  What should we do when a woman says she was raped by a man – do we believe her, or do we demand some kind of physical evidence, even if she’s a traumatized child, say. How about domestic abusers? Should they be allowed to have guns? What is our reaction to a school shooting – do we merely add our thoughts and prayers, or do we take action to stop them? Can we encourage politicians to change the laws to stop selling weapons to children with a history of violence?

Any writer cannot help but have a point of view. It will be determined by our race, our gender, our histories, our family, our sense of place, our faith, our biases. We have a sense of what is right and wrong, what is just or unjust. We are called upon to witness, yes. But are we called upon to try to make a better world just with our writing? Can we imagine our way to a better world? Can journalists, instead of glamorizing a shooter, tell us more about the lives of the victims? Can journalists not shove cameras in the faces of recently-traumatized children? Can we write poems that lead people to think differently about current events? Maybe. I am currently laid up, but I don’t believe I’m completely powerless.

I don’t have all the answers, but I know for sure the answer isn’t to give up, to shrug our shoulders and say “that’s just the way the world is.” That’s the opposite of making anything better. Poetry, visual art, fiction, non-fiction, journalism – all of these are forms that can influence people. We have a responsibility to try to be an influence for a better world.  Let’s make a little noise in a dark universe.