"Stick to my knitting" by Roger Ebert

Stick to my knitting

By Roger Ebert on October 19, 2012

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2012/10/stick_to_my_knitting.html

"SNIP.................................................

The notion for this blog has been rattling about on my to-write list for months. It many ways it should not need to be written. All the same, again today another of Those Comments came in: "Just stick to movie reviews. you have no idea of what you're talking about. You love socialism? Move to Europe."

There are 352 comments on that blog. My guess is that 15 or 20 of them give similar advice. I also get it constantly via Twitter and Facebook. It goes without saying that it's my blog on my site and I can write what I please. But that makes it all too simple, especially since almost all of these comments are friendly: "I've enjoyed your reviews for years, etc." "I like your writing, etc."

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There may be a larger implication, that most people are not qualified to hold political opinions. It's said to be impolite to bring up religion or politics at dinner. That means many meals go without any discussion of what we believe or why we believe it. That's not the way I was raised. Politics were always discussed at our family dinners, and in my memories of long-ago Thanksgivings, after the table had been cleared at my grandmother's house my dad and Uncle Everett and Uncle Johnny all repaired to the living room, fired up their Luckies and Camels, and started in about Eisenhower and Stevenson, Nixon and Kennedy.

There was never any anger. What I remember is good-natured laughter. My Uncle Everett, a Republican, had a way of following a punch-line by lighting a fresh smoke and puffing emphatically. It was a form of punctuation. Then my dad: "Everett, the trouble with you is..." Uncle John was considered a political miracle, because in a state, county, city and Congressional district controlled by Republicans, he was a Democrat and yet had been appointed Champaign postmaster, which was a patronage job. "Everybody likes John," people would say.

................................................SNIP"