John Sherffius, of late the cartoonist for the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado, makes a statement that doesn't involve a lot of fireworks or snark, but which seems sensible and very worth saying.
There have been a couple of those lately, not so much from the ranks of editorial cartoonists as in the form of signs at the various OWS sites or on Facebook.
Could it be that editorial cartoonists feel locked into the idea that they have to have a partisan "gag" in their work?
Or is it that editors won't run a cartoon that doesn't have a partisan gag, so that any cartoonist who produced a simple statement like this would find it in the reject pile, along with that hypothetical tree in the forest?
This cartoon at least made the pages of the Camera, because, until Tuesday, Sherffius was on staff there and, if a cartoon makes it out of the sketch form, it's not likely to be spiked by the home team.
But now, well, that's diffo, as Jimmy Hatlo would say. Sherffius, who won a number of awards including the Herblock, the top one in editorial cartooning, resigned from the Camera and is going to seek other fields that may provide a little better pay. He's got a family and a couple of bright kids who will be heading off to college in a few years, and this "ink-stained wretch" thing just wasn't cutting it.
So this one was the last of six years in Boulder, and I hope the Camera will keep his gallery of the last few years on-line, because it's worth browsing.
And I'd note that, while this particular cartoon makes for a good valedictory, it's not like he had to step out of character to deliver it. Moreover, I might well have featured it without the news hook attached.
The nation needs to stop a moment and take a look around and see where we're at, and we shouldn't all need to quit our jobs, or lose them, in order to do that.
This is part of the benefit to us all -- right or left -- of the Occupy movement: It asks the question, "Whose side are you on?" and it asks people to consider what they really want society to be like.
Which, in turn, makes it such a shame that events in Oakland have spun so far out of control. Contacts out there assure me that, across the bay in San Francisco, Occupy demonstrators are having no greater conflict with authorities than elsewhere, and they place the blame squarely on the Oakland police for having raised the confrontation level.
It's likely -- based on logic and history, not politics -- that news of the confrontations will draw more confrontational demonstrators to the site, while more conciliatory types will stay home or at least hang back and be overshadowed. Which in turn means we probably haven't seen the last of riot coverage from Oakland.
Just as, at a local demonstration where everyone else just looks like everyone else, the one dork in the face-paint and the blood-stained Uncle Sam suit gets all the photo coverage, the national and international coverage of the overall movement is likely to skew towards Oakland because that's where something interesting is happening.
Indeed, "if it bleeds, it leads," and, when every place else just looks like every place else, you feature the place that doesn't.
And that's a shame, because it obscures a lot of reasonable, important narratives going on around the country that have power to influence other people, and, through their growing ranks, the leadership that has created the dysfunctional partisan gridlock of which Sherffius's supercommittee speaks.
The thing is, you don't have to join the demonstrations to stop and ask if maybe the things they're talking about are things you care about. The conversations in the diners and the barber shops are more powerful than those in the parks.
But the more the OWS demonstrators can be dismissed as rich college hippies or as destructive socialist crazies -- and plenty of conservative cartoonists and commentators are hard at work doing that -- the more this moment to stop and reflect is wasted and the more the politics of cynicism, fear and division have a chance to prosper.
Which makes it a loss to have someone who could produce today's comic decide to hang up his gunbelt and go back to the farm.
Still, there are new voices out there. A fellow named Al Haug came up with this poster, which became popular on Facebook about a month ago.
But you don't have to create a great poster, either.
You just have to be willing to be part of the solution instead of part of the problem, and to remember that the question "Whose side are you on?" is one that, once it has been asked, if you remain silent, you've answered.
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