It was impossible to watch Sunday’s enormous march through traumatized Paris with any detachment; events that touch us all invariably drive us to gather, so we felt it too. Stating the obvious, certainly, but, as I grow older and my inventory of remembered public sadness grows — JFK, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Oklahoma City, 9/11 — it remains remarkable.
I am somewhere in this crowd, gathered for a vigil and moment of silence six days after the assassination of John Lennon. Imagine all the people, living life in peace he wrote. Grief and anger at his loss drew us then, as, so many years later, grief and anger summoned the people of Paris.
I am somewhere in this crowd, too: another Sunday, in 2014, 34 years later. We’re in San Francisco, not Paris, but once more have come together, a continent and an ocean away from the millions in France. We too mourn, and rage, and join together for comfort — but look. Thirty four years later, John Lennon is still present, asking the same questions, demanding, even as we mourn, that we do better.
Published by
Cynthia Samuels
Cynthia Samuels is a long-time blogger, writer, producer and Managing Editor. She has an extensive background online, on television and in print, with particular experience developing content for women, parents and families.
For the past nine years, that experience has been largely with bloggers, twitter and other social media, most recently at Care2's Causes Channels, which serve 20 million members (13 million when she joined) and cover 16 subject areas. In her three years at Care2 monthly page views grew tenfold, from 450,000 to 4 million.
She has been part a member of BlogHer since 2006 years and has spoken at several BlogHer conferences. Among her many other speaking appearances is Politics Online, Fem 2.0 Conference and several other Internet gatherings.
She’s also run blogger outreach for clients ranging from EchoDitto to To the Contrary. Earlier, she spent nearly four years with iVillage, the leading Internet site for women; her assignments included the design and supervision of the hugely popular Education Central, a sub-site of Parent Soup that was a soup-to-nuts parent toolkit on K-12 education, designed to support parents as advocates and supporters of their school-age kids. She also served as the iVillage partner for America Links Up, a major corporate Internet safety initiative for parents, ran Click! – the computer channel - and had a long stint as iVillage's Washington editor. In addition, she has developed parent content for Jim Henson Interactive and served as Children’s Book Editor for both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com.
Before moving online, she had a long and distinguished career as a broadcast journalist, as senior national editor of National Public Radio, political and planning producer of NBC's Today Show (whose audience is 75% women) where she worked for nine years (and was also the primary producer on issues relating to child care, education, learning disabilities and child development), and as the first executive producer of Channel One, a daily news broadcast seen in 12,000 U.S. high schools. She has published a children’s book: It’s A Free Country, a Young Person’s Guide to Politics and Elections (Atheneum, 1988) and numerous children’s book reviews in the New York Times Book Review and Washington Post Book World.
A creator of online content since 1994, Samuels is a partner at The Cobblestone Team, LLC, is married to a doctor and recent law school graduate and has two grown sons who make video games, two amazing daughters-in-law and three adorable grandsons.
View all posts by Cynthia Samuels
I am somewhere in this crowd, too: another Sunday, in 2014, 34 years later. We’re in San Francisco, not Paris, but once more have come together, a continent and an ocean away from the millions in France. We too mourn, and rage, and join together for comfort — but look. Thirty four years later, John Lennon is still present, asking the same questions, demanding, even as we mourn, that we do better.
Thanks for your post. Over the decades I’ve noticed that when tragedy strikes in the form of death or physical disaster, folks reach out, pull together, become closer. Just for a time. And how often our governments expect riots and looting and mayhem when that is the furthest thing on the minds of the vast majority of people. We come together in community very naturally and with open hearts.
Yes! But as I watched, and even as I wrote this, I was quite certain it was what Christopher Dickey called a “feel-good moment.” The issues to solve if we are to live you you describe and we all wish, appear to be nearly insurmountable.
We naturally come together in time of crisis and then, without leadership and long term commitment, we turn back to getting on about our own business.
It was beautiful to see people coming together, though the very cynical side of me has had trouble with the public processing of the events.
Amazing to see all the people around the world united against such a horrible act of violence! #Je Suis Charlie