Upon my return Sunday evening from a Hawaiian cruise (with very limited internet access) I was thrilled to see that this BLOG had been hit hundreds of times while I was gone...until I realized that it wasn't the good kind of viral internet proliferation—i.e., we've been spammed!
Hopefully, having now eliminated these unwanted Comments (and reporting the culprits as spamers), we can now return to the IMHO engaging dialog of a couple weeks back. Indeed, I'll make this post brief by returning to a couple of themes that IMHO were not fully explored previously.
One of the more curious ironies of our ostensibly-more-tolerant modern times involves how we, at the same time, seem to be increasingly intolerant. We seem to be once again retreating into tribes: e.g., political parties branding all others, and all others' positions, as not only wrong but evil.
We make it all the worse by presuming more-or-less homgenous opinions within these overly-broad-labeled groups. In actuality, individual liberals and conservatives alike generally hold diverse individual views that, ironically, often cross one another's traditional party lines: e.g., on environmental issues most all liberals are stridently conservative just as, on most issues involving civil liberties, conservatives are often fanatically liberal. As a few options-trading friends of mine reflected at the close of our monthly meeting yesterday "If you take any of our individual views, on a series of individual topics, sharp conservative/liberal lines tend to fade quickly"...go figure.
So the finer point, the same one that I began drilling in earlier posts, starts at more personal individual-centric levels (though they often tragically expand outward to group-think patterns as well). Specifically, I'm referring to the tendency we have to take a disagreement on one issue and make it make us more disagreeable with everyone outside our "tribe" on most every other! We proceed then to burn in these same attitudes and stereotypes by tuning in to the media outlets that not only reconfirm the contours of our pre-existing perspectives but villainize others': conservatives turn on to Fox, CNBC and the pages of the Washington Times while liberals prefer CNN, MSNBC and the Washington Post. The days of a common Huntley & Brinkley denominator are distant memories to us older folks and utterly unknown to our kids.
But here's one more pesky "modern times" irony: one with which I'll close this post and invite your Comnent.
Call it PC Run Amok or just the product of a more evolved civilization, but we seem increasingly predisposed to deny our own nature these days. The same natural selection that enabled the Ascent of Man in the first place makes us naturally attracted to our own kinds and wary of others; we strive to achieve security and comfort for ourselves and loved ones; we default to caution in any new and/or unfamiliar situation; and, at some level, we still recognize that, beyond the erotic, sex plays a vital role in the survival of the species. Yet notwithstanding these entirely "natural" inclinations they're increasingly labeled with slur words like racist, greedy, hateful, homophobic, etc,...go figure
