3,951-ish Days of Artificial Division
As I sit here and read the bickering and backbiting going on between and within the various factions on the internet, locally, regionally, nationally and internationally, the temptation to become jaded, cynical and dismissive of other people, not just their opinions but the people themselves, can always be present.
Should we avoid these temptations? The answers from our better angels tell us, "Yes, we must!" In order to keep peace, to maintain societal interactions on some type of even keel, we must separate the actions from the opinions but not the person. The daemon in our other ear says, "No. Actions follow thoughts and words. We must exorcise the infidel!" The reasoning is largely the same as the opposite conclusion: To preserve societal unity.
Can we in fact delineate the differences in this political/social media climate without drawing the ire of "the other side" and receiving and internalizing hate? I mean, aren't people just a bit more than their opinions? How about the denizens of the web with whom the metaphorical "we" have had a history of interactions with going back years? Do we truly know these individuals (if they are individuals) as we think we do? Or do we know a narrow slice of them, filtered through conflict, performance, and repetition?
Portions of this post were (sentences, snippets, phrases) were written by ChatGPT. The actual ideas behind the phrasing is all mine.
I came back and Changed the Title (How Trump fucked the USA- Day 3,951-ish) because what I had set out to type, a listing of ways that Trump has demonstrably harmed our nation and the world, morphed into a thought experiment that didn't really look like the title anymore.
Be respectful.
If you are going to comment, please present some reasoning to backup your posited thesis.
And away we go...
As long as there are people (a lot of people) who think that "woke" is worse than the worst president in history there is little hope. I think most of us on this forum will be in heaven (or somewhere) before all this gets straightened out. And by then the AI apocalypse will be here or close.
I think as individuals we can relate to the other side, but meeting in the middle is not going to get us to where we need to be.
I agree. We are more than our expressions, more than the opinions we choose to espouse.
What we as members of this forum should try not to lose sight of is that we are not one dimensional. Each of us is shaped by an accumulation of experiences and perspectives. I suspect that most here, despite the disagreements, want to see the country continue toward what they understand as free and just, toward that idea of a more perfect union.
What follows from that is a discipline. Not an easy one, and not something that happens automatically. We separate the opinions being expressed from the person expressing them, recognizing that the two are related, but not identical.
What I’m trying to get at is the tendency to collapse a person into the opinions they express. Once that happens, disagreement turns into dismissal, and conversation tends to end there.
The basic premise of this site is free and open discussion. If we get into the habit of treating the person as the problem, rather than the position, we lose that premise pretty quickly.
A more perfect union. The action is on the word, "perfect. Best I could wish and ask for is a union where people accept their neighbors as different from themselves where it is so, and leave that be when applying a model of "do no harm."
That would be perfect. What we are doing now is going to tank our great country, because we have 'firebrands' on whichever sides, plural, intent on taking over the government. . . and using it to the detriment (and disregard) of all Others.
I can not support any such activity as that! Conservatives and liberals, both, remember when compromise made sense to reasonable people. Now ask yourselves NTers. . . are YOU really being reasonable in your politics?!
So, do we "know" our interlocutors? Do we know the people behind the icons that we interact with on a daily basis?
Can we, after years of interaction in our neighborhood, truly define the characteristics of those who share the virtual space with us?
Well, it turns out we do not know our congressional representatives. . . for reasons that vary: Some professional and some private. All mattering, as it should, in representation.
As for the virtual world we 'inhabit' for years upon years, it is a hard thing and true all the same that, anonymity means we only have a great many ONE dimensional characters performing daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly on the site. One-dimensional means little or no depth to the individual, as they are not sincere in the sense of genuineness. . . just shallow players in some long and foreboding game of political warfare in-lieu of its counterpart political peace-making.
That is sad.