Listen to the Moans

By Donna Ladd Wednesday, August 8, 2007 5:19 p.m. CDT

Sunday morning, I was organizing my new writing room at home and turned on the Galloway Methodist broadcast on WAPT to keep me company. I didn't pay much attention until I heard Rev. Ross Olivier challenge his audience to "listen to the moans." I pulled up a chair to listen.

Rev. Olivier said it was up to us to answer God's prayers, not the other way around. The way we do that, he said, is to allow ourselves to hear the "moans" of the needy. Too often, he said, we get caught up in petty pursuits of the so-called "real world," and ignore the moans of hunger, poverty and injustice.

Indeed, we often pay much more heed to the loudest moans—actually, whines—of the power-hungry. This is never more true in our fair state than during campaign horse-race season. It's always the same—the politics get ugly, aided and abetted by a media that asks few substantive questions and expects no real answers to questions that matter to you, me and the people begging for our help.

During election season, the Jackson Free Press Web site becomes a target for these whiners, probably because we (Adam Lynch, in particular) make a sincere effort to ask hard questions and get solid answers so that we can help our readers with the political decision-making process. Over the last several weeks, we've had an upsurge in what we call "trolls"—people whose sole goal is to shut down conversation they don't like by being ugly and nasty.

They show up anonymously and loaded for bear. They stop at nothing; this time around, they even signed up posing as prominent people in the community, such as an assistant district attorney, in order to bash D.A. Faye Peterson. They fake e-mails, even stooping to online fraud—at least one such person has used Web sites such as the attorney general's campaign site to send e-mails to our users pretending to be me or another blogger. (My favorite this year was a fake one to me supposedly from JFP publisher Todd Stauffer, stating simply, "You suck." Given that we share an office and a home, I feel confident he could find the opportunity to say that to me in person if he felt it absolutely necessary.)

The trolls get particularly vicious with women on the site, or women they dislike, such as the D.A., using fake e-mail addresses with stuff like "laddisabitch" or labels that dissect women's body parts. (Reminds one of Melton's Christopher Walker trick, eh?)

Then, inevitably, when we explain the blog rules, they say we are trying to silence disagreement. No, we respond, we just don't allow people to scribble on the walls.

Unfortunately, there are many ways to scribble on the walls about people, and some are a bit more tricky than the trolls we can easily suspend from the site, or report to the authorities for cyber-fraud.

This past Saturday, a man who presents himself as a smart "editor" and blogger around town posted something misleading about me on his site in the guise of exposing "dirty politics." Formerly a strong Melton supporter, he had previously "reported" a rumor about me that seemed to have been started by Melton folks during the mayoral campaign. He wants people to believe I decided to write about the Juvenile Detention Center scandal of the mid-1990s because of mythical "connections" to the Harvey Johnson campaign.

The truth—which I've told this "editor"—is that Melton had tipped me to the scandal weeks before I reported it, and that I found the original Newsday story in the Nexis database soon after. I then went about doing something I think of as "my job"—I called the original author and sought comment from other sources involved; in other words, I reported. I then printed an accurate piece. (Which, incidentally, is not in dispute. Nobody has said my reporting wasn't true.)

I know full well why this person mongered this rumor two years ago and why he's doing it now—despite his own public change of heart on Melton. He disapproves of me personally and my paper politically—I presume because I'm a progressive chick willing to challenge the good ole boyz with real information—and he wants to hurt my credibility.

Suffice it to say that when I read his blog entry, it, well, pissed me off. I report on the merits; if you're a so-called "editor," then answer me on the merits instead of regurgitating false rumors. So I quickly fired off a post for my blog—a tit-for-tat calling out this rascal and defending my honor in the process.

Todd, the wise man that he is, saw the post and told me I should take it down. One, don't give him publicity, he said.

And two, it doesn't matter.

He is also the man who likes to say, "Do the right thing and wait."

I closed my post, realizing he was right. The trolls—whatever form they take—always ratchet it up around election season. Their goal is simple—discourage people from open dialogue on topics that they, the trolls, find disconcerting or threatening. Obviously, feeding the trolls only makes them hungrier.

I got up the next morning and tuned into Rev. Olivier's sermon as light poured through my blinds. "Listen to their moans. Answer God's prayers." Help the needy, stay the course, do the right thing. Focus. "Be in solidarity with the poor," says Proverbs 14:31. (That one hangs in my office.)

The moans are many, and they are loud. If we listen, we will hear pleas for help coming from so-called "crackhouses" in the Virden Addition, from police officers who aren't getting what they need to do their jobs, from young men who live in Melton's home with convicted felons, yet have nowhere else to go where they can eat so well and watch movies on a huge-screen TV from cushy recliners.

The moans are from 12-year-old girls in our training schools locked in dark rooms who defecate in a hole, and from children raped in our juvenile facilities who never saw justice because they supposedly "consented."

The moans are from young people who don't know where to turn in a city that already considers them lost "thugs." The moans are from people who do not believe they have the right to speak up when the mayor and police try to search their homes or their cars without a warrant. The moans are from home and business owners whose property has become little plastic pieces on our mayor's game of Monopoly. The moans are from potential investors in the city who get caught in the crossfire every time the mayor's mood changes.

We must listen and respond to these moans. We cannot wait to do the right thing.

Previous Commentsshow

What's this?

Support our reporting -- Follow the MFP.

Use the comment form below to begin a discussion about this content.

Jackson Free Press