Often, I leave tabs open on my browser as short term bookmarks, to remind me of things I found interesting or that I need to follow up on. Sometimes, I save them in a file that I come back to later. Sometimes I try to combine them into a blog post. Other times, I just eventually close them without comment.

One blog post I’ve been meaning to write a response to is Dean Landsman’s Those Year-End Recap Letters. I was struck by how it related to those year-end videos from Facebook that everyone complained about.

Another web page I’ve kept open is PRODUCT REVIEW: THE INVISIBLE BACKPACK OF WHITE PRIVILEGE FROM L.L. BEAN BY JOYCE MILLER

As I think about these web pages and others that are open, I try to find some thought or collection of thoughts that bring everything together, and this time, my mind wanders to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk about The danger of a single story

We all tell our year end stories in a way that makes it sound like we aren’t facing struggles. That is what we’ve been taught to do. Then, when someone starts talking about how they may have to confront struggles we don’t because of our skin color, too many of us all of a sudden can talk about our own struggles in an effort to deny that there might be such a thing as white privilege.

The challenge, it seems, is to look at life through many different lenses. Here’s a challenge: How do we look at the world through the eyes of a Native American offended by the name of a football team, The Redskins? How do we look at the world through the eyes of an Indian offended by the name of a beer, Gandhi Bot? How do we look at the world through the eyes of a Muslim offended by cartoons of the Prophet?

How do we respond?

Another set of tabs that I have open right now are related to Kirby Delauter. I first heard about Kirby Delauter from tis Vox article. Frederick County, Maryland, Councilman Kirby Delauter threatened a local paper with a law suit for using his name without his permission. The newspaper responded with brilliant editorial response. Be sure to pay attention to the first letter of each paragraph. It has taken off and become a popular hashtag and who knows what all else.

Councilman Delauter has since apologized. Yet thinking about it, as much as I found the editorial funny, it did remind me of those playground brawls where one kid keeps saying another kids name to annoy him or pick a fight.

What is the right amount of snark in an editorial or a cartoon? How do we find this balance by avoiding the dangers of a single story?

This gets me through a bunch of the tabs that I have open, but I have more which maybe need to become part of a subsequent blog post.