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I've been doing a lot of thinking these past several weeks, and there's something I have to say, so here goes.
I think it's time for us to have a forum dedicated to discussion/debate with those who may not share our political views and our fervent desire to send Bush back to his Crawford ranch in Texas for the good of the country. Notice I said DISCUSSION and DEBATE, not hateful name-calling back and forth. There's more than enough of that already, and it doesn't do ANY OF US ANY GOOD. We are all, in the end, Americans. Now, before you start clicking on the Alert button en masse, PLEASE continue to hear me out. I think my credibility here and my 8,366 posts have more than earned that courtesy.
As I said, I've been thinking about this for weeks now. One of the major things that finally got me seriously considering it have been the recent posts calling for a "ban" on postings of threads from Free Republic. We've already banned all threads from Conservative Underground (which actually allows debates and discussions, btw, they don't ban you if you express the slightest disagreement with them, unlike both FR and DU) and now people have decided that they don't want their eyes and brains corrupted by seeing anything from Free Republic. Well, fine, you don't want to read any FR postings, here's a simple solution and one that we as liberals have been telling people all along: DON'T CLICK ON THE THREAD. DON'T READ THE POST. It's just that fucking simple, and it's what we've been telling conservatives and others all along when they want to decide what we should see/watch/read/listen to, whether it's the FCC or Donald Wildmon and the Family Research Council or Asscroft and his goon squad and their lap dogs at the Justice Department, or a parent in your kid's school who wants the school board to "ban" a particular book, movie, etc., from the classroom. We CANNOT turn around and do the same thing we claim the other side is guilty of, we're just as hypocritical in that case. We love to go on and on about how hypocritical the other side is, well, then, let's not do the same thing ourselves.
We love to make fun of FR for squashing the slightest disagreement with the party line and for not allowing the slightest differences of opinion. And that's very true. But let's look at what we do here; frankly, we don't allow much of that either. Both us and FR are message boards devoted to a particular philosophy; both sites serve as a safe place for their members to interact with like-minded individuals without having to deal with those who don't share their particular views.
And that's okay, there's nothing wrong with that. God knows how much we desperately need that, considering the POTUS, SCOTUS, Congress, Senate, judiciary, most state legislatures, and even the majority of the media are now in the hands of republicans, who are becoming, it appears, increasingly extremist. And many of us have friends and family who are on the "other side", thus making a site like DU all the more important to us.
But there's also where the problem lies. We are becoming, it seems to me, more insulated, isolated, and inward-turning, and we are becoming more hypersensitive than ever before to the slightest statement that's not in exact agreement with us.; I can't express how heartbreaking it is to me to see this happening and with people who should know better. I witnessed a prime example of this a few days ago in a thread where everyone piled mercilessly onto another poster who had not, as far as I could see, done or said anything wrong except ask another DUer to prove the truth of what she'd said about him; he had to post a message to Skinner asking that his name be cleared. Is this the kind of image we want to project? Is this the way we want others to see DU? I'm not talking about the wingers who already see us this way and who would see us this way no matter what, I'm talking about people who just might be interested in what we have to say and who just might be able to help us achieve our goal of getting Bush the hell out of the WH and sent crawling back to Crawford where he belongs.
It's fine to have a place where we can commiserate and interact with those who share our views and beliefs, but we also need to learn how to communicate with those who don't and we can't do that by just preaching to the choir all the time and avoiding those who express even the slightest disagreement with us. We can't do that by name-calling and childishly poking fun at freepers, wingnuts, etc., however cathartic it may be sometimes. You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and it's more critical than ever before that we win the WH back this fall, we simply cannot afford not to. And it seems to me that, while we castigate FR for not tolerating the slightest disagreement with its views and beliefs, we are doing the same thing.
e claim to be better than "them" because we, as liberals and progressives, are far more "tolerant", "open-minded", able to listen to views that don't agree with ours and facts that may not back up what we want to hear, etc. Well, then, let's live up to that. Let's actually show it. Let's have a forum dedicated to debate and discussion, CIVILIZED debate and discussion, with those who may not necessarily share our views and our, dare I even say it, groupthink. Last week, some DUers were saying that it would be a "total disaster" if we did this. Well, I have to ask, WHY? WHY would that be such a terrible thing? What, exactly, are we afraid of?
Most of us have no problem with firmly standing up for what we believe, so what would be the big deal? People, we HAVE to be able to do that, to discuss and debate our views and beliefs, or we can just forget about taking back the WH and, thus, the country. We can sit here and preach to the choir and each other all we want, and that's fine because we all desperately need that, but we HAVE to be able to do more and we HAVE to be able to come out of our comfort zones and interact with those who will be the ones, in the end, to make that happen. We're no better than the fascist wingnuts at Free Republic if we don't. And for those of you who cringe at the very thought of interacting in a forum with anyone who doesn't agree with your positions, that's fine, you do NOT have to enter the forum! No one would be forcing you to do so.
I'm sure there are plenty of you here who rarely, if ever, venture into the Sand Trap, aka the I/P forum, or the gungeon, aka Justice/Public Safety, or the election forum, or even the lounge lizards who never go into GD because you don't want to deal with it. And that's fine, it works fine for you, and no one forces you to go into those forums. Well, the same principle would work here. Perhaps some kind of special "log-in" would need to be implemented to keep those who do not share DU's philosophy and political views/beliefs from spilling over into the other forums. But we simply MUST learn to talk TO and WITH each other, and not AT and AGAINST each other the way it is now. Nothing is going to change in this country if we don't.
We're always lamenting about how divided we are as a nation now, and that's very true. But if we don't engage with those who believe differently than we do because we don't want to get our of our comfort zones, we're just a part of the problem.
Okay, I've said my piece now. I can hear the Alert button being clicked left and right and all over the place. SIGH. But I think most of you know me well enough to know by now, and I think my 8,366 posts go a long way towards showing that I'm not trying to cause any trouble here. You know how strongly I despise the Boy King Impostor in the WH and how desperate I am, along with all of you, to get him out in order to save our country. And You know I love you all, and I love this place. But I just hate to see what's been happening lately, and I'd hate for us to turn out to be no better than the freepers and wingnuts.
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