I enjoy writing these So it go columns partly because I’m free to pick my subjects (which annoys some columnists, but who’s stopping them from doing the same?) and partly because of the feedback from readers – in online comments, in phone calls, or in face-to-face encounters in town. In these exchanges where one hears very nice compliments about this piece or that (nobody calls you to say “What crap you writing, Martins?”) people will tell you how they look forward to the column, and various big-up phrases like that, bolstering your ego, but the truth is that, as any columnist will tell you, you don’t make any significant difference by the things you write. Yes, you’re airing out the subject, people read it, many of them will compliment you on it, sometimes they’ll even send it on to other folks, but it doesn’t cause them to change their minds to any substantial degree. Essentially, readers will applaud the points they agree with, or the positions you deem good or bad that coincide with theirs, but in the end you’re not changing their positions or their interpretations of things in the society. The changes come only when people or organisations, in the government or outside it, take on the subject and get down in the trenches, fighting for legislation, fighting for enforcement, and fighting for funding to make the change; that’s when it happens. For all our cynicism about the political process, and I stand guilty, it is only through the political process that significant change happens.
Even when you see an uprising, as recently in Egypt and Libya, where a government was suddenly and dramatically put out of power, nothing really changes until the new political process is manufactured to replace the old. In effect, the population is simply in limbo until that new political creature emerges; the change, as we are seeing now in Egypt and Libya, doesn’t happen because a letter writer or a voice on television is calling for it.
The writers and creators among us like to claim responsibility for change, but they’re dreaming. All the song or the play or the essay is doing is alerting –
