The Value of Making Noise

I just read a post to an online group I belong to, in which a shall-be-nameless-for-privacy's-sake person said "I'm mad as hell but there's nothing I can do about it." This was a local political thing she was mad about, affecting libraries, and thus our kind of people (readers, I mean) directly.

I immediately thought: Wait a minute, there IS something you can do. You can MAKE NOISE!

I still believe that forcing things out into the open, talking about them, yelling if that's the only way to be heard, is valuable. I have held to that belief in spite of the fact that I was challenged, hard, on it: A man for whom I had considerable respect tried to shame me into thinking the opposite. I had gone to talk with him as a representative of some good cause, not a political one. But our conversation never got off the ground because of this thing that he said: "Dianne, while I'm inclined to want to listen because you're attractive, and I know you're an intelligent woman, I can't hear a thing you say. Every time I look at you all I can see is that Peace Symbol tattooed on your forehead." He made his point, because I've never forgotten his exact words. This man, who was a newspaper editor and a writer of some well-respected fiction too, had lumped me with my fellow members of the Peace Movement. This was during the height of the Vietnam War. Our subsequent conversation that day, instead of being about the good local cause I was supporting, was about what happens when protestors make themselves obnoxious to people in power. His contention was that it produces a backlash, it doesn't work because the very people who might otherwise be willing to re-think are turned off by the very noisiness of the protestors.

He came very close, within the proverbial hair's breadth really, to persuading me that he was right. But at the last minute, I stood up and left him without further dialogue. Embarrassed, I mumbled something to the effect that we were too far apart, there was no point in continuing to talk longer, and I was sorry he wasn't willing to listen to what I'd come to say. I was, in truth, more comfortable being lumped with my fellow protestors than in the company of this man I much admired, whose approval I secretly coveted. Not to mention that he could have offered me a job (I wrote a freelance column for his paper occasionally).

There IS a time when making noise is important. It's when you are truly powerless to do anything else. The more people you can gather, the more noise you can make, the better the chances are that you will at last be heard. The real mistake is to be quiet and polite.

And maybe that, when you get right down to it, is at the root of some other things I've blogged about here. Maybe our current society is so in-your-face and impolite and just plain noisy because there are way too many things that haven't be heard by the people who make the decisions and who do in fact rule our world.

We writers make noise in a way that is essentially silent, unless what we write is read aloud. But our words are still powerful. I don't need to explain that. It's why I press myself to continue this blog. This is my way to make noise. But I'm going to do my best to be more tolerant of the noise-makers in the future.