The Naked Blogger
When Dorrit asked if I wanted a blog page, I said yes, but with trepidation. That’s because we reveal ourselves on blogs and social media, maybe more than we think. With a book or a movie you can craft your message over time, review it, rethink it, until you are sure you can stand by it. Yes, you’ll change your mind down the road, but probably not as soon or as obviously as with a blog.
In 2009 I put my toe in the dangerous waters of the internet for the first time. I started a blog with Alana Yu-lan Price, my co-editor at Tikkun, then the premier spiritual progressive magazine in the US. Blogging felt exciting to me. I threw myself into it and wrote some 400 or more posts over a year or more and then gratefully retired from the fray, until now. My very first post on Tikkun Daily explains my trepidation then, and now. I am reprinting it in full because I still like it. I think it says something useful about writing our reactions to events in real time.
The Naked Blogger. April 21, 2009.
We are starting this blog and I am terrified. What if I inadvertently reveal my innermost thoughts?
But isn’t that what a blog is for? What is a blog for?
A blog is a different view into the authors’ responses to the world, in real time. It strips off the carefulness of a magazine. It’s mental and emotional nakedness.
The magazine only has considered, well written thoughts on a topic—which may be different from the author’s first ideas about it. Here you get quickly written pieces, without editorial control, that include those first responses. I will imagine that each blog post is well considered as I write it. I will think that this one little thought I am writing down, this one response to something out there in the world today, somehow reflects my lifetime wisdom. But an hour, a day, or a week after posting, as comments come in, I discover how useless my first thought was. I change my mind in public. Mea culpas. So many times having to admit I pontificated when I didn’t know, or I wrote out of my old prejudices. It gives me a stomachache to imagine it already.
Blogs are about showing vulnerability. They are about sharing a response to the world as it is experienced. My own favorite blog is Andrew Sullivan’s, even though I disagree with a great deal that he writes. I was aghast at his semi-erotic approval of George W. Bush during the 2000 election and his enthusiasm for the Iraq War, but even then I appreciated his honesty as a man who wrestled in public with contradictions of being a gay Catholic with AIDS. This honesty was confirmed when he turned against Bush and the Iraq War, gradually, in public, to major invective from his former friends and supporters. That is one of the most courageous things I have seen online. He has done more than anyone I am aware of online to blow the whistle on torture. I think his judgment is deeply off in opposing universal single payer health care and progressive taxation, and in his whole-hearted support of capitalism. But I respect his sincerity. His blog has helped me understand many conservatives whom I disagree with.
Could this blog help people understand a spiritual progressive response to the world in a different way than Tikkun magazine or the books of writers like Michael Lerner and Peter Gabel
Yes, if we are ready to show how we bloggers, less brilliant than Lerner or Gabel, newer to these ideas than they, are grappling with this response to the world every day. We just have to write well and be transparent. And have the stretchers ready to cart us off to recuperate.
I still sometimes read Sullivan and am as exasperated by and grateful to him as ever. I appreciate him for this recent interview with Steven Pinker in which he talks about how he lost his mind after 9/11 and supported a war he later turned against. I love a really sincere mea culpa.
My attempts to understand conservatives and especially all those who voted for Trump are one of my major current projects. I’m sure I’ll write about that in a future post.
