It’s 2010, hate on your fellow American!
In my quest to grow an audience for the blog that I am already considering abandoning, www.dadinleftfield.com, I’ve made an interesting observation: we usually reserve our nastiest, most visceral ugliness for our literal allies. We hurt the ones we "love the most". Wanna see some ugliness? Go check out the infighting and backbiting at stereotypically homogeneous message boards like www.newsbusters.org or www.dailykos.com.
I wish I read Arabic. There’s got to be some highly entertaining opinions floating out there in Islamic cyberspace that we’re missing out on. Those CIA cyber-spooks have a pretty amusing job.
It is intuitive to presume a positive relationship between shared community/geography and empathy, but that’s 20th century thinking, dude. In the 2010’s, you won’t see more flaming zingers of ideological purity than between a Saudi Wahhabist and a Saudi corporatist; or between social progressives and social anarchists over at the www.DailyKos.com, or between the old white Evangelical Palin lovers versus the old-white Evangelical Palin haters over at www.newsbuster.org.
Wherever you go in the world, ideological puritans are inflaming and being inflamed by...their neighbors. Look at the U.S. Congress this very second. Look at Sunni versus Shia (as well as very many obscure sub-sects): They hate one another more viscerally than they could ever hate we clear-cut Infidels. Our bloodiest war: the U.S. Civil War. Scott Roeder could’ve unloaded his puritan hatred upon deserving Taliban and returned home to a medal. Instead he chose to target his most-hated enemy and spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Soon I hope to observe a schism between ideologically-pure Tea baggers who want to burn their Medicaid card and those who don’t. As of yet, I have been unable to identify any of the former species.
Yes, there’s no fighting, like in-fighting, and ‘Lord knows I am guilty of it. Nothing gets me more rhetorically fired up than disagreeing with someone with whom I thought I shared a "same page". I don’t know why we do it, or what it means. Is it better to channel our animus inward? Toward Palin instead of Al-Zawhiri, Toward Obama instead of Osama?
This in-fighting phenomenon seems to be the rule, right up until it isn’t. All of our petty divisions instantly (albeit temporarily) evaporated on September 11th, 2001. But it doesn’t take a 9-11 to have the "Love thy Neighbor" switch, override the "Punch thy Neighbor" switch (or vice versa). For instance, I didn’t realize my true feelings about faceless extremist Uncle Larry, until I fought the urge to defend him from even more faceless extremist cyber-commies at the Kos. I’ll bet if we were on a battlefield, or even sitting together at a UT game, our differences wouldn’t seem so significant either.
Okay, I’ve gone too far. I don’t want to fight in any damn battles or hang out with that carbUncle Larry ;)
Maybe all this infighting is a good sign after all; or at least a sign that we really have nothing better to do...
www.dadinleftfield.com