News-Record.com

Allen,

I haven't had my full quota of coffee yet this a.m., but here are a few thoughts that have made it through the morning fog:

While there certainly was a lot of T&R blog discussion, most of it was too late in the process to have any influence at all on the "truth" aspect--research, testimony, the final report--and virtually impotent as far as any effort toward community reconciliation.

As you may know, I've been publicly advocating for some kind of organized effort for reconciliation since the report came out a year ago. What I've come to find out is that no reconciliation component was built in to the process or designed as part of the followup. I've talked privately with several of the key T&R advocates, and not one of them can even describe what a reconciliation effort would look like in GSO, much less how it would be organized.

How does this relate to blogs? I guess in the same way it relates to the News & Record: No one seems to think that this is a subject worth discussing; no one seems interested in calling the people who organized this thing on the carpet for pulling what looks like a bait & switch.

There was such grand potential for a creative and positive outcome from the T&R process, yet I don't see that this community has moved an inch from the polarized positions it held on Nov. 4, 1979.

How very sad.

But, Elizabeth, wasn't there some reconciliation in the hearings themselves. Weren't there apologies nad statements of regret?

I don't mean to ignore or denigrate the expressions of regret that have been made, Allen. But a handful of apologies, no matter how sincere, do not a community reconciliation make.

Where is the reconciliation between the police/city and the CWP survivors? Where is the reconciliation between the police/city/Klan/CWP and the people of Morningside who were terrorized by those groups' actions/inactions that day? Where is there any effort to stop the blame game and work together to better the community?

I don't claim to know how to organize a community reconciliation effort, but it both saddens and frustrates me that a group that has consistently used the term "reconciliation" in its name for the past five years or so can't at least be give us a clue as to how to proceed.

As to your original question about blog/media influence on this issue, I still don't see any. I've been wrong before, though. What do you see?

I believe blogs featured some of the most thoughtful, robust discussion on the subject, including the Truth and Rec blog.
As for other media, the News & Record provided reams of analysis and commentary, including a pair of pieces authored by you, Elizabeth.
As for their impact, I'm not sure how you measure it, but I think it helped keep the discussions going. Whether anyone's mind was changed, one way or the other, I don't know.

Looks like it's just you and me in this discussion, which is maybe a clue :-} as to the level of interest in continuing the T&R conversation.

It seems I've been overlooking things right and left this morning, and you are so right, Allen, about the wealth of lively, thoughtful discussion throughout the various media/internet outlets. That kind of communication would not have been anywhere near as broadbased if our only outlet remained the LTE format, or, for those few of us who have the sway (or is it moxie?), the lengthier opinion columns.

I guess maybe where we differ is that I'm looking beyond the blog/media discussions that went on during the process and immediately after the T&R closed their doors. I'm looking for interest in the broader community for continuing the conversation, and I just don't see it. Not even on this blog.

No individual had more of an impact on the GTRC than the Troublemaker. I got the cops and the klan to the hearings. I reported the secret meeting at Mt. Zion.

And while doing this, I stopped the unsafe and illegal demolition at Souhtgate Motor Inn when the demolition was being down BEFORE the asbestos was removed. This made the workers safe from health hazards. Isn't that what the whole thing was about?

I got the GTRC to make the klan an official report reciver and met with the klan alone and gave Virgil my GTRC volunteer shirt. I was the only media period to interview Virgil after he spoke at the hearings.

Is that the TRC's failing or the community's lack of interest, Liz?

One of the things the N&R blogs clearly captured was a vehement level of community uninterest in the entire episode. I think if you look at the N&R blogs in total, a majority of posts (including mine) would hit the following talking points: not a representative event, all outsiders, why revisit this again?, commie navel-gazing, what are we really going to learn?, the whole machinery is biased, crazy Communists and Klansmen (what do you expect?), yada yada yada, etc., etc.

Without blogs, the community's lack of interest would not have been documented nearly to extent that it was.

What then, to make of all those people who participated in, and attended, the T&R hearings and other events?
What also to make of people who said they didn't care, then wrote multiple op-eds about their vehement opposition?

what did gtrc do?

Say again, Ben? Not sure I follow your question.

There's obviously a radical fringe that lives for such things and a press corp eager to cover them. That's maybe 1% of the community. When every TRC chicken dinner is front page news, the record is skewed.

The vehement opposition is precisely my point: the blogosphere facilitated the articulation of opposition that otherwise would have gone unexpressed and unrecorded. The voice of the people pushing back against the TRC and the N&R, in whose view the shootings were and are an issue of crucial importance, the "resolution" of which would somehow usher in an age of racial amity, reconciliation, and universal brotherhood.

Thanks for the observations, Scott. However, I'm not sure I'd call most of the people I saw at these events "radical fringe."

Brian444's observations say a lot more about Brian444's perspective, and his willingess to examine his own assumptions, than they do about the process I observed over the past few years.

He hasn't even bothered to acquaint himself with the basic facts of the story. "All outsiders?" Well, no. Just not so, even before one factors in the cops and the informants.

I do find his comments valuable, though -- they represent a fairly pervasive mindset in this city, which refuses to pay attention to the details and the report and the process, no matter how those things differ from their preconceptions. Minds were made up before this thing started; some people seem proud of that fact.

It's certainly true that I, like most people in this city (I'd call the mayor representative in this respect), made up my mind before this whole thing started that it was totally unnecessary. And as is often case where preconceptions are concerned, I (and we) were right. Nothing really new emerged except a new emphasis on police culpability--a valid point, perhaps, but hardly earthshaking--and a new effort to memoralize with statues those deemed partially responsible for the whole mess. Also, I believe that we are now supposed to eliminate poverty and get diversity training, recommendations that almost everyone views as detached from the incident itself.

The problem from day one is that the project was premised wrongly on the assumption that the event was of broad communal significance: that it allegorized neatly into a story of race, class, and oppression. Few bought into this premise originally; few buy into it now. The few who do are like UFO fetishists who swear that if you'll just read these ten books and look into the details of Roswell, you'll come over to their side. They're frustrated when you won't and don't.

As I've said before on this blog, a similar effort organized around the sit-ins would be, I think, extraordinarily productive and useful, since that incident crystallized an entire social structure. The 79 shootings just don't meet that standard.

Allen,

Do you plan to give us an update on the University of Calgary T&R discussion?