Barbara J. Hamby

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No Comment is Sufficient

Tonight I planned to write about how virtuous I feel after cleaning a whole drawer in my personal file cabinet. But, when I sat down to write, I glanced at my email. My son had sent me a poem from the website of a local photographer journalist. I went to that website, and clicked on his gallery of photographs from Iraq, after reading his article about his work.

Each photograph has a sentence or two below it explaining what the viewer is seeing. Below that is a sentence in small print: “No comments have been submitted yet.” I call myself a writer, but I could find no words sufficient to comment on those very moving photographs. Probably no other viewer could either.

I share this young man’s yearning for peace. I am grateful he still has hope that he can make a difference by photographing people all over the world and writing about them. He is very talented at writing and photography. I wish I shared his hope and had the ambition to make a contribution myself.

For years I wrote letters to editors until I began to think I was “preaching to the choir.” It seemed to me the people who read what I wrote and agreed with me were the ones I heard from most often. Those who disagreed violently were not going to change their minds, nor did they offer any arguments that made sense to me.  Rather, they seemed to delight in insulting me.

I don’t mind being insulted, but I don’t have enough time left in this life to spend it trying to change closed minds. I still write to politicians to let them know my views. They already know that old ladies vote, so they listen and reply politely, whether or not they intend to be influenced by my opinions