Yes, ‘Preaching To The Choir’ IS All It’s Cracked Up To Be
It’s how we build a community.
I’m a huge fan of ‘preaching to the choir’. It’s how I see my role as an opinion writer and I’ve defended it many times before. I was going to write about it again, since we seem to forget, when we’re looking down on it, that preaching to the choir is really, simply, talking to our community. Then I remembered this piece from October, 2020, and it says everything I wanted to say.
Keep in mind that this was written before the election. I may have to haul it out again before the next election if nothing changes.
Comments welcome, as always.
October 26, 2020
We’re counting down the election in days now. Just a week away, and if we’re doing our jobs thousands of us are still out there trying to line up the votes for our side. Me, I’m over on Twitter many times a day, sharing posts, writing my own thoughts, knocking the cheats and lies, doing my best to be positive when it seems everyone else is sure the sky is falling.
We’re facing the election of our lives. Everything is at stake and our only hope, after all we’ve been through, after all we’ve tried to do to stem this disaster, is in getting out the vote.
Just this morning I wrote on Twitter: “It’s as simple as this: We can’t win if we don’t vote.” I used this hashtag to give it some direction: #VoteBlueToSaveAmerica.
Not exactly brilliant, or even pithy, but the fact is, our crowd has to vote if we’re going to win the election coming up, and if we repeat these things often enough they eventually gain legs. Followers retweet and it becomes someone else’s message. If we’re lucky it’ll drown out all those other tweets saying the exact opposite. Because the truth is, we can’t win if we don’t vote.
As an opinion writer my natural tendency is to write with one audience in mind: those who agree with me. I’m not trying to convince anyone who doesn’t want to be convinced. That’s a total waste of time. I’m preaching to the choir and what the choir is really looking for is a conversation. We don’t have to agree on everything; we just have to be open enough to listen.
I didn’t know for a long time that I was ‘preaching to the choir’. (So that’s what that was!) but I’m thoroughly, happily okay with it. And you should be okay with it, too.
So whenever someone says, “You’re preaching to the choir”, instead of saying, “I know! So sorry!” you might say something like, ‘You bet your ass I am’.
Who else would you be preaching to? The MAGA crowd? Right. Because they’re all ears. Mitch McConnell? Lindsey Graham? Those guys live in the muck. We’re not going there. Donald Trump? LOL. Seriously? The ‘undecideds’? No such thing. Everyone with a voting card knows exactly who they’re voting for.
Today, Monday, October 25, 2020, the Senate will be voting on Amy Coney Barrett’s takeover of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. We already know she has the votes and will get the seat. (Someone saw team members carrying Champaign bottles into the Senate chambers yesterday.)
So today those of us who have spent years honoring the presence of RBG, taking comfort in who she was and how much she cared about the mercy of the rule of law, will be crying and commiserating, joining together as a community to try and get through this — as we’ve done so many times before when our hopes and dreams have been dashed.
At some point some of us will speak out, but no matter which direction our conversation takes we’ll be talking to each other. We’ll be preaching to our own collective choirs.
Because we’re the ones who matter. We’re the ones we care about. And we’re the ones who can figure out how to win this thing and take us to a place where normality and decency rule the day.