THE POWER OF SILENCE
In a fast-tweet world, stillness can be strength.
One of the best tweets of the past week came from a fake Barack Obama account.
It featured a brief video, showing Michelle Obama grabbing a smartphone out of her husband’s hands, just as he is in the midst of tapping out a message.
The tweet said: “The only reason I haven’t started a Twitter war with @realDonaldTrump. Thanks @MichelleObama.”
While many of us would pay considerable money to witness a Twitter war between the former and current presidents of the United States, common sense would seem to be on Michelle Obama’s side (or at least the one in the video). Knowing when to shut up — and when to speak up — has become a running conversation in politics this winter, more so than usual. Certainly a lot of it is being prompted by the election of Trump and the almost daily startling events in U.S. politics.
But it doesn’t end there: a popular hashtag on Twitter this week during International Women’s Day was #WhatIWishISaid: an invitation for people to retrospectively speak up about their regrets for times they had shut up rather than spoken up.
Here in Canada, the political debate over how to handle Trump is often boiling down to this dilemma, especially for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Some favour diplomatic silence when he disagrees with Trump; some (like the New Democrats) believe he’s being too quiet in the face of more radical moves coming from the White House.
I’ve been doing host duties on a weekly podcast this winter, called Brief Remarks, and it’s here where I’ve realized that the current state of political debate has prompted a lot of people to wrestle with questions of when and where to speak up.
Quebec City MP Joel Lightbound represents the riding where the tragic mosque shooting took place in January. He came on the podcast to discuss his regrets for saying too little about racism and Islamophobia in the past. He’d expressed that sentiment quite eloquently in the House in the wake of the shooting, in fact, saying he now wished he’d not been silent when hearing people say hateful things about Muslims.
On the show with Lightbound was fellow MP Omar Alghabra, who’s been a frequent target of anti-Muslim rhetoric over the years. Alghabra talked about how he had a rule while campaigning for his seat in Mississauga in 2015. Once a day, he permitted himself to reply to hostile or racist voters by saying he didn’t want his or her vote.
A couple of weeks later, we talked on the podcast to two journalists who had covered a rally in Toronto, organized in opposition to the anti-Islamophobia motion in the Commons. Zach Ruiter from torontoist.org and Sarah Hagi from Vice said they had to wrestle with quoting or rebroadcasting some of the more outrageous, factually wrong statements being made by people at the rally.
And this week, in a show devoted to how women politicians are treated on social media, Kathleen Wynne’s communications director, Rebecca MacKenzie, talked of the ongoing debate in the Ontario premier’s office over how to deal with nasty comments from citizens — when to block it from the premier and public view, and when to allow the criticism to stand. It’s never an easy discussion, MacKenzie said.
All of these conversations have become more pointed, of course, because of technology and social media. In the old days before the Internet, when we were all still told it wasn’t polite to talk about sex, politics and religion in social company, extreme statements and opinions were simply filtered out of the general debate.
Now, though, it’s a lot easier to detour around those filters and air harsh, even wrong information — which gets amplified on Twitter or Facebook or other social networks. In media newsrooms, in political backrooms, that forces a nearly daily discussion — speak up or shut up?
In the House of Commons this week, when 338 young women took seats as part of a “Daughters of the Vote” event on International Women’s Day, Trudeau gave an interesting glimpse into how his office is weighing the speak-up-or-shut-up conundrum. He said he’d come to the view that maybe some open opposition to the anti-Islamophobia motion (M-103) was not such a bad thing.
“If everyone just agreed and we’d moved on, maybe we wouldn’t be addressing the very scary and real spike in hate speech,” Trudeau said.
Ultimately these decisions about when to hold one’s tongue (or stay off the keyboard) come down to a practical consideration: will saying something change anything or, more importantly, anyone’s mind?
If that is a likely outcome, then perhaps it’s good to have a more unfiltered debate. If not, maybe we all need a Michelle Obama, fictional or not, stepping in to fend off a useless war of words. sdelacourt@bell.net
It’s become a daily discussion in newsrooms and political backrooms