Ba Rock Watch, 4 May 10
Tuesday, May 4th, 2010The Link: Obama’s plea for civility is exactly right
As I said again, countless times, on this blog, I am not your standard right-wing junket. I do not join in lock step with the blowhards on Fox News, even Glenn Beck and I’m basing Blood and Metal on his 9-12 principles. I am libertarian, and a classic constitutionalist, but I’m more than willing to do a little give and take if it means it comes with an answer to a problem that will work for all of us, and if even a President who some say would make McCarthy cream his pants says something I agree to, I’ll just go out and say it out of the belief that he’s doing what he thinks is the right thing…and sometimes he’s actually right.
Okay, I might not be safe for radio, but I digress.
I’ll go on record and say that I’ll be standing with the President on the call for more civil and cooler heads to prevail. Political discourse is being controlled by the extreme fringes on both sides—we’re talking people who make Michael Savage look like a Red Diaper Doper Baby, and others who make Keith Olbermann look like a 9-year old basement dweller posting on /b/….wait a minute, Keith Olbermann is a 9-year old basement dweller posting on /b/. It just happens to be a cable news show, nice disguise you retards. The way he called Bush II a fascist, it sounds like he really wanted to impune his sexual preferences, wouldn’t you agree?
And that leads me to my little comment I want to make to this topic: Not only has vitriol of any kind been occurring long before Obama, and some would say long before the Declaration of Independence. But the current crank–up on vitriol has been noted pretty much throughout all of this past decade, from November of 2000 on, and is has been spreading onto not just civil discourse in everyday life, but in the way we deal with each other on a daily basis.
I’m probably the only person with a blog who would make a link behind all the Bush-bashing that we’ve experienced all this past decade, and let’s be honest, it’s still going on today, with stuff like the bullycide of Phoebe Prince. It started with all the open hostility toward the man on the top of America’s government and trickled down in ways Regan couldn’t even dream up, until it developed into animosity among our fellow man. There was a hiccup in the few days after the World Trade Center attack, but it was quickly buried in the status quo of we vs they. And I’ve not only seen it’s effects in the world around me (The Hit in Run in Connecticut, the aforementioned Phoebe Prince and others, the sheer amount of people who would travel out of their way in a pickle costume to pester a certain village idiot who made a comic fusing Sonic and Pikachu—Whatever or not he deserved such attention is up to you to decide) but it has even affected me as well. (At least they didn’t switch to a Sailor Moon costume after they rag on Chris and hunt down my ass as an encore. I would have called the cops on them.)
Granted, you’ll always have assholes and crazy lunatics out there, both online and off, but they weren’t running the asylum like they are now, and it’s dangerously affecting how two people sitting across from each other talk to each other if at all. Even if you want to meet people half way, the tendency to think of everything as either all of nothing—or that people actually address each other as ‘fucktard’ or ‘asscunt’ or scratch one’s chin and go ‘let me scratch my balls,” (That actually happened to me IRL) or grope man breasts and complain that they’re lactating—can really keep people from doing so.
A common theme among Tea Partiers nowadays is to post, “Not Racist, Not Violent, Just No Longer Silent” on their pages, blogs, or twitters. I’d like to modify that as I’ve done on the Nine Principles. Something that shows that you’re not one of these fringe nutjobs be they from the political blog sites or 4chan, and don’t consider their existence enough to just remain a faceless drone in life in general, on line or in the real world.
Any suggestions are appreciated.
