What We Send Into the World

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So I have a little blog.  I’ve had it for two years now.  It’s a small platform, sometimes very small.  But nevertheless, I have my place to speak.

And then I write on mothering.com.  That’s a much larger platform, but as nearly all websites do, it can only reach a small portion of the web.

And then I have my children.  Their little ears soak up everything I have to say whether they want it to or not.

And I have friends and family.  I run into strangers quite frequently while running errands or while out on the town.  And I have multitudes of acquaintances — other moms at school, children’s activity instructors, the nurses at my doctor’s offices.

In other words, when I speak, there are ears that hear.  For better or worse.

And so do you.  Your ears might be different.  You may have more or less of them.  Some may take your words more or less seriously.  But for better or worse, we all have our platform, and we all make our voices heard.

And this was running through my mind when I read an article on Facebook this evening.  Apparently Ann Coulter tweeted a message about Obama during the State of the Union in which she referred to him as the R word.  I don’t think anyone would put it past Coulter to make comments like that, and I hope most of us have tuned her and people like her out.

But luckily for all of us, John Franklin Stephens of the Special Olympics chose to respond to her.

And I started to think about the Coulters of the world.  There are thousands and probably millions of them.  People who will say and do anything to get attention and fame and fortune.

She has a platform, and she did a truly genius job of growing it by saying things that most of polite society is too evolved to say out loud.  And she always gets me angry.  She makes my skin crawl.  She makes me tense.  It strikes me as fundamentally unfair that someone should be able to speak such words and not only get away with it but flourish because of it.  It feels wrong and unfair and deserving of reprimand.

Bun then I read Stephens’s response, and I thought about my own life, and I decided to let the Ann Coulters of the world roll off my back.  Because she doesn’t get away with it.  Being hateful and rude and insensitive might get you fortune at times, but it also damages your soul.  It changes you who are, and it taints what it is that you gain from it.

And so I have my words and I have my platform, and I am vowing once again to myself to use them for the good.  We can’t end hatred; we can’t squelch all injustice.  But we can be a loud and strong beacon for what it is we stand for.  We can insist on bringing light into this world.  We can demand better of ourselves.  And as such, we will have made one tiny little bit of this world a little bit better.

What are your platforms?  What do your words promote?  What is it that you hope to send out into the world

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