OneDayBlogSilence--A Lovely Gesture, but...


There is a clearly heartfelt movement afoot to create a blogosphere memorial to the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings, on April 30, called OneDayBlogSilence.

The goal is to cause everybody who reads and/or writes blogs to stop and think. No words, and no comments, just silent reflection about the dead in Virginia, and, if you like, victims of violence everywhere.

It seems these days that the unexpressed thought has gone the way of the buggy whip, thanks to the web, 24/7 cable, blackberrys, etc. And yet, as much as I admire the OneDayBlogSilence gesture, I don’t think silence is the best way to share our heartbreak and support for the families of these victims.

Because of the Imus situation, there’s been a lot of talk about the “national conversation,” as it relates to race relations. That phrase always makes me roll my eyes. Far too often what passes for a national conversation is no more than we the people watching television as other people speak, presumably, but not necessarily, for us.

Invariably issues that deserve a national conversation are ignored until there’s a fresh incident. Then we watch people talk at each other, or yell at each other, for hours and hours, until the producers and the hosts and the home audience are exhausted, and move on to the next hot issue.

One day it’s race, another day it’s guns. There’s an event, an easily digestible moment, and if there’s video to go with it, yippee. Television coverage, however, does not equal a thoughtful “national conversation,” since it lacks participation by any of the actual people who are the “nation.”

The blogosphere, on the other hand, can do a better job of providing a forum for an honest dialogue. (It often doesn’t, for a variety of reasons, but it certainly can). And as the shootings this week remind us, we need to talk about our country’s fascination with both real and fictional violence. The second amendment and the availability of guns are only part of the equation. Any position you can reduce to a prefix, pro- or anti-, is easy to grasp. This issue isn’t that easy. Conversation is only a start, but it can at least lead to consensus. Democrats have been so afraid to even talk about guns that it’s hard to know exactly what the consensus opinion is.

Senator Harry Reid is quoted as saying that before tackling the issue we should all take a breath. Fair enough. But while we’re waiting to exhale, I would say devoting April 30 to wrestling with the national appetite for violence, that issue and no other, would be an equally fitting memorial to the horror that occurred at Virginia Tech. That’s what I’ll be doing on my blog.