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Land this suckah, and leave it on the runway to rot
Look, I think Don is right that the political discussion underway is
potentially more divisive and destructive than any past conversation
about OtR's Christianity. I don't want to read the list and feel anger,
as I do right now. I don't have time to even begin to respond to all the
specific comments made.
I will say that no matter what else K and L believe, one time,
accidentally, Linford expressed his disgust with some anti-American
comments made on this list; and the list just about went to the trash can
of memories over the incident. If you don't know what it was, review
September '01.
I have to talk about rhetoric now. Not the things being said, but the
way they are being said. I remember saying once before on this list that
we need to limit our responses to one thing. In a discussion like this,
throwing out a thousand random threads, or even five, in a general way,
can fuel too many fires, too quickly. Take one claim that's floated out
here in the past 48 hours: America is racist. Holy freakin' freakin'
freak. Is this not a HUGE discussion, a massive claim, an inflaming
claim. Can this not OBVIOUSLY lead to a lot of rancor? And yet it came
in the midst of several other comments like it in their anti-American
tone, equally inflammatory.
Two problems, just to start with: first, the comment is made with no
support, no specificity, no discuss-able dimensions. Second, its being
embedded in a bit of anti-American screeding makes it little more than
gas on an already big fire. I wouldn't mind discussing a racial issue on
the list, specifically, in a limited way. But we have no business
addressing all the racial issues, and a general splattercrap bomb like
that can ONLY lead to a too wide-ranging, too-emotional discussion.
In general, we've been exhibiting the worst habits of public debate. TV
talk show snippetting. Big bomb rhetoric, the yaddayaddayadda pointing
fingers and hating rhetoric. (Not everyone has done that. There have
been some wonderful, balanced responses, too.)
Lemme say this: in a typical debate, no one--no one--who cannot
understand the logic of the other side, who cannot appreciate the origins
of the other side's decision, is worth following. Why? Because that
person is dangerous. These are human decisions, human political
situations we're addressing: no answer is 100%. Good leaders know that
they have usually made an informed decission and that they might have
made a different decision and that there are drawbacks to the decision
that has been made, but a decision had to be made. There are, of course,
situations where one side is flat, cold wrong: legal slavery, for one.
(But any particular solution for ending slavery in a particular country
is bound to have flaws.) But most of the issues slipping around the list
in the last couple of days have not been such issues. For example, if
the issue was really ALL OUR RIGHTS ARE BEING TAKEN AWAY, now, that would
be big. But that isn't the issue at all, and you know it. Even where
there is a move to mess with our rights in the wake of 9/11, our country
has plenty of speech and expression apparatuses for us to speak out and
make changes and keep egregious rights violations off the books. There
are even apparatuses with which we remove laws from the books. Get
this--we can even vote a president out of office every four years. That
is such a radically liberal thing in the history of the world. It's
astounding. We take it for granted.
So, yeah, we can find examples of problematic situations with rights: but
we don't have general oppression or anything nearly like that. (In Cuba,
for example, some of these posts would already have been illegal and
potentially-life threatening for the posters.) People on both sides of
our proverbial political aisle have spoken out against the PATRIOT acts
specific provisions. (There's a gun-rights advocate on the right, Dave
Kopel, who has written as cogently as anyone about the problems with the
act.) The debate is going on, the concern is there.
In general, too, we should all recognize, our country has tended toward
more and more rights, not less and less. A slippery slope argument would
have to contend that after the Japanese internment in WWII, Americans
would be permanently on the way to authoritarian anti-rights-ism. But
what followed WWII? Oh yeah. The 60s.
But what I am trying to talk about here is not the issue of rights. It's
the issue of rhetoric and communication. The old liberal belief is that
letting ideas be aired will allow people to see which view is the
stronger. But big bomb rhetoric does the opposite: it encourages the
people to be inflamed without considering the full arguments. It
encourages mobocracy. It's dangerous and more scary than [you pick a
scary thing].
In a similar vein, I have just about zero tolerance for any comparison of
American conservatives, or most other people, to Nazis. The comparisons
won't hold and almost always come as part of the sort of inflaming crappy
rhetoric that incites mobs, not the sort of balanced exchange of ideas
that will keep the republic on its feet. Nothing done in the States so
far bears any resemblance to the Nazis coming for the Jews. To make such
a comparison is facile. Do you see ovens? Do you have any sense that the
American people would stand for such a thing? If you do, what are you
smoking? Stop smoking it now.
I could say much, much more; but I don't need the ulcer.
A phrase I recently learned: "Life is short, let asses bray." We may
need this phrase in the future, on this list, to keep our selves out of
the bad fights. We are on the brink of bad fights. At least one person
has publically announced that he's leaving the list.
Fred
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