Let's Try This Again

When I started this blog, I was ready to say what I needed to say, but hadn't bothered to say on so many political message boards.  On all the conservative message boards I could find or knew or, liberals were held to be the stupid spawn of Satan on an anti-American mission.  This makes reasoned discussion of principles impossible.  Either it's an echo chamber, or the person who thinks different is tarred, feathered, laughed at, and ridden off the board on a rail.

Then, on the liberal message boards, all conservative people are Republican (they are treated as synonymous) and therefore are the spawn of Satan.  No, wait, liberals would never believe there is a Satan, that would require having Biblical beliefs, and I have yet to run across anyone who self-identifies as a liberal who does not either discount the Bible out of hand or water it down until it has no influence.  It's more correct, therefore, to say that conservative thinking people are treated as though they were the spawn of the Satan that does not exist and is as much a fable as God is believed to be, but which Satan can be conjured up long enough to condemn someone who is just evil, evil, evil.

Wait, "evil" also presumes the existence of a right and wrong outside human determination, and that's way too close to Bible for them, too, but I think you get the idea.

Oh, and for the record, the tirade against the liberals was so much longer because they make less sense in their opposition to conservatives.  For the conservative boards it's simple: you're liberal, you're gone, end of discussion (of discussion with the liberal person and of all other discussion of value).  Doesn't take much to say that.  Liberals, being creatures of anti-standards - and as a result, near-zero consistency - require much more explanation.

There, that part's done.

We are headed for a bad day, folks.  There have always been extreme partisans, at least in the last 56 years that I've been alive.  However, there was a level of common sense that prevailed.  The extremists had a voice, the huge common sense majority had a laugh, and we all went forward; sometimes in a liberal direction, sometimes in a conservative direction, and sometimes in a direction between them. 

Now, not so much.  Strike that.  Now, basically not at all.  Now, common sense is not only frowned upon, common sense is laughed at, and worse, twisted around and applied with a darning needle, as though it only applied to one tiny little convenient part of an argument.

I have three grandchildren now.  I fear for them.  If they are not liberal, I fear they will be marked as outcasts by society at large.   Yes, that sounds pretty "out there" but it's remarkably possible.  After all, all of white society marked all the blacks in the south for nearly a hundred years, and for the same reason, because black people showed them something about themselves that they did not want to see.  The longer this country goes in the direction of laughing off societal standards and of substituting law for society's self determination, the more and more liberal this society will become, and it's likely to be the brand of liberal we see everywhere today, because both situations are based on each individual doing whatever they want to do, with a premium placed on being the first one to do something that the previous generation would consider abnormal.  Rather than pushing ourselves from within to get better, the liberal mindset would push/enable us by the government to get weirder, then to claim that is also better.

Another sad day.

I've rambled, I know, and much probably needs expanding and explaining.  I'll be back to do that.

Al