There's an extra gain the fomenters of divisiveness get in return for making political discussion something to be yelled and irrationally approached.
"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." -- Alan Greenspan on 60 Minutes, Sept, 2007.
There are those who do not want the national discussion to veer towards questions about why we entered Iraq (or tortured, or warrantlessly wiretap, etc). So they have done an effective job of distracting the American electorate by raising the acrimony to the point where we are too busy working ourselves around the false arguments and disinformation to broach the subject cogently. Those who are not troubled by the rationality of their stance are not affected by this, much like how a blind person is not thwarted by a bright light shone in their face.
Division has always been a strategy for gaining political power, but there is another insidious effect this has on our collective psyche. As serious political discussion becomes too difficult to have, We The People will stop talking to one another. Once we stop talking, it is only a matter of time before we turn against one another. Once that happens, we will have truly lost our country to those who stand to gain nefarious control over it.
So keep on blogging, but also find ways to keep face-to-face discussions going as well. There's an amazing amount of disinformation being heaped on our neighbors and friends. Let's be the people who help folks sift through all that, even if their final opinion differs from your own.
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"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." – Abraham Lincoln
"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities." -- Voltaire