A New Kind of Loneliness

IT'S A NEW KIND OF LONELINESS, ONE I'VE ONLY BEEN picking up on lately. And the more I’ve talked to people about it, the more I realize that I’m suffering from it myself.It’s difficult to describe but emanates from two realities: the use of social media, and the loss of the public imagination. I’m afraid that both have affected me, and it’s a kind of personal isolation that I don’t think anyone sees. At the moment I feel more like Vincent Van Gogh than anything else: “A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.”In recent weeks I’ve learned that others are feeling a similar sense of loss. Recently I was asked to speak to a writer’s group in another city. In one of those “aha” moments, all of us who were writers realized that our desire to write about society as a whole has often been chastised by individuals and groups who claim to be the “authentic” voice for all manners of issues and groups. The example the writers raised in the meeting concerned Canada’s aboriginal population.Put plainly, these writers have experienced a growing awareness as a group of the numerous challenging realities facing First Nations people, especially women, and they have felt personally empowered to speak out in their writing. But each earnest effort was countered by First Nation’s spokespeople who said no one had the right to write on such issues except for qualified point people. This development left the writers in a kind of forlorn silence. They are some of our best writers and artists and their voices are needed. Empowered with the yearnings for justice and personal responsibility, they were nevertheless being told to let others do the talking. Nowhere did they sense this kind of rejection more than on Facebook and Twitter.Let me state here that I easily identified with those sentiments expressed so sincerely by those writers. I tend to write broadly because of decades of experience in various disciplines. It certainly doesn’t qualify me as an expert in any field, but it does call out my love for humanity in writing. Yet I am increasingly coming up against special interests that object to my taking on their cause. It’s a growing trend and in the process the public space is losing some very good writers and observers for fear of offending anyone.