An  Alternate Meaning Tells The Story

I am a journalist. The Cyber Age has made every blogger a journalist, quite as much as our colleagues of the hard copy and radio/television. Without meaning to boast, this blog has been read in over 130 countries, commonwealths, dependencies, trust territories and all like that. And these blogposts have been read more than 42,000 times in the three years of this blog’s existence.

I want to stand with my journalist colleagues, living and dead, around the world. People may not like what we write or speak. That’s all right; they can comment, start their own counter-blogs, or ignore us altogether.

But murder is out. If your religion, belief system, or whatever, is so weak that anyone with a keyboard or a microphone can insult it, you should really question why you believe it. You are perfectly free to insult mine–it has been insulted, persecuted, denounced, derided, banished, exiled and denigrated by those far abler and much more powerful than you. It has survived all the foregoing.

This being a non-political blog, I did not want to jump into a fray that I can fight elsewhere. And that we all should fight, wherever and whenever.

The matter here, however, transcends politics. I want to add my voice in this place to “Je Suis Charlie”.

But my wandering mind came upon an almost-forgotten slang phrase I hadn’t heard since the last time I was in England 25 years ago. It went something like “I was a right Charlie for believing that story.”

So we’re all Charlie. Just not right Charlies. That distinction we can leave to those whose beliefs are so weak they can be insulted. By Charlies.