Letters to the Editor
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Hey there
Hi Cary. I've responded to an LW in your columns twice before, and it wasn't until you wrote your preface this morning that I realized that both times I wrote, there was a bit of negativity in it about something I felt you missed in the LW's message and that she might benefit from hearing. That may be relatively common among the responding community and if so, it's shown a pretty limited version of how members like me actually approach your column. I want to tell you that I read your column every morning at work, and I feel comforted and blessed to have, you, a fellow poet, to hang out with during my long, grey days. Like the LW, I'm a creative who has taken a strange, semi-suburban hiatus from real existance to walk in the shadow-worlds of external acheivement and social roles. I think there's nothing inherently wrong with those things unless they get out of balance--they allow the physical world to roll. Because of my shadow life, electricity gets made, aging parents get cared for, my future choices expand. And, my life has gotten out of balance--I work full time at a mind-numbing job, go to grad school in a very dry science, work an extra 10 or 15 hours a week as an intern, and spend most of my time in relationships that I feel are fundamentally meaningless except as spacers in this glorious, curious web of meaningful, aware beingness. Like the LW, I'll only start to feel uncrushed when I paint my fucking duck decoys, dance my heart out on the roof of someone's car, see my therapist, and ignore the trolls. And you, my friend, are part of the real world, of a soulful azure light that occasionally illuminates the shadows. I thank you for it. Your offerings of beautiful language and deep consideration and paradox are one of the things that sustains me when I'm so far from the art studio and the monastery and the deep love. Transpose that over the bilious sniping cowards who sneer at you from their powerlesness--transpose the fact that you help keep real humans feeling alive in an unreal world. I also like knowing now that you read all the letters that the community writes and get complexified, like I do, by their perspectives and displays and insights. Thanks for your life. Be well.
Morgan
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@McCarr29
"When I was younger I wanted to superior and great, and to my mind, it meant looking down on things, places, people. Now I wouldn't mind having some of those things, living in those places, knowing those people. I would just like be happy and content, reading trashy magazines, smiling at ugly babies."
Me, too. I heard music in my head as I read this.
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Cary's comments
I am one of the readers/posters who sometimes objects to Cary's advice. I am particularly bothered by advice that puts the LW in danger, such as advice to go talk to a violent neighbor about money owed, or advice to demand answers from child welfare and complain to the media in response to a routine and legally mandated investigation of an abuse allegation. Some of Cary's responses seem to me caring and empathetic; others seem like he has focused on his writing at the expense of the LW's problem.
I don't buy Cary's point that we all dislike things but shouldn't broadcast them. If I think an advice columnist is steering someone wrong and I point it out, I think that's reasonable. Sure, there are (largely anonymous) posters who are unnecessarily rude about it. They're probably the same people who are rude in traffic. We all have to deal with those people in some part of our lives, even if we don't write a column.
I did enjoy parts of what Cary wrote in his prelude today (the image of him as a ninth grader with a briefcase and a bow tie, his dislike of oddly colored shoes). But it seems strange to me that he divides the critical feedback he receives into comments he brushes off and comments he considers hateful.
Interestingly absent from Cary's comments was any indication that he has agreed with, acknowledged, or integrated into his writing any of the feedback he has received about the column. In fact, I think his characterization of people's take on him ("they seem to feel an infuriating frustration that I will not become their amanuensi" "they see a person sitting in the advice giver's chair who is not doing it the way it has always been done") does a disservice to the valid critiques of his writing that I have seen (giving dangerous advice, mischaracterizing the LW's situation due to over-identifying with the LW, indulging in a tangent at the expense of providing the LW with useful input, self-promotion).
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Some have said similar things,
But I wanted to address Cary's preface, anyway. In particular, this:
But there are others that seem to come from pure disgust, hatred and outrage, that seem to be directed at me, personally, the actual person writing the column.
Those letters are mis-directed at you, personally. In my opinion.
After years of observation, I've drawn this conclusion: people who feel powerless in their own (3D) lives write those letters, and hundreds of thousands like them in other places, every day, all over the web. They take out their, yes, disgust, hatred, and outrage on people they've never met, and - importantly - WILL never meet. They can feel powerful because they've made someone feel the way they do every day of their lives.
It's pitiful and annoying and, yes, hurtful if you're the one they've decided to use as a target.
But it's not about you. I write that meaning for it to sound encouraging - nothing you've done or said could ever justify the level of internal filth some of these posters spew your way. It's all about them, and it always will be. It's sad, really.
I speak from experience - I moderate a posting board elsewhere in the Web, and periodically we get posters whose only goal in signing on seems to be to create drama or denigrate others in order to fill some void in their lives. Luckily, we don't have to care about freedom of expression to the detriment of our internet family (we've been around four years, and those of us who've been there the whole time do feel like a second family), and when a post is far off-topic and massively insulting, we delete it. And warn the poster. If it continues, we ban that poster. I wish you could do the same.
I read your column every day. I hope you'll see this letter and the dozens of other supportive posts, and take the pat on the back and virtual hug you deserve. Try not to let it get to you, and when it does, remember how very empty and sad the lives of those who have nothing better to do than spend a morning making Cary Tennis feel bad must be.
Now maybe I'll read the actual response. ;)