I spent a little time today reading every Diary posted to Daily Kos. Yes, I am a glutton for punishment. Yes I was entertained, amused and despairing, often at the same time, and sometimes in the same Diary.
I was inspired by the civility following the Civil War, moved by a teacher, doing her best and doing so well and shocked to learn that the Seminole are some kind of criminal organisation undermining America. They are not, but even right wing shills and trolls post Diaries.
Let's go eat pie :)
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Diarist note: I considered adding a "Meta" Tag to this Diary, but the scope is far wider than this site, and it should not be so limited.
There is ObamaPie, IsraeliPie (that one is kosher), PalestinianPie, GayPie, CenkPie. There is a whole recipe book of pie, and we progressives fight over it .... all the time.
Which lead me to wonder why?
I mean ... I didn't just read pie fights, I read good Diaries. Diaries that inform, inspire and sometimes sadden. Even the freakin' Pooties made me grin today!
I remember when I first came to this place. Back in 2005 I was an new immigrant, about to be married and looking for a spiritual home. I found it here and the place scared the crap out of me. I would read the Diaries, and there were some great Diaries. I would read the comments and despite my long history of commenting on various internet Forums (that was what brought me here in the first place) I was a bit scared of the people here.
They were and are smart, knowledgeable, witty and sometimes wrong. They were so scary-smart that I was reluctant to join the debate for fear of my fragile ego (yeah, really) being torn to shreds as a mere appetizer before the main course was even delivered.
Neither did I much want to be troll-rated. I didn't have much of an idea how that process worked, but I was reasonably confident that it was not something I wanted happening to me.
Over 5000 comments, and 110 Diaries have passed since then, oh, and 2 (count 'em) troll Hide Ratings. In my time here I have written great Diaries and stinkers. Some of the great Diaries have passed largely un-commented on, unloved and unremembered, but not all. Some of the stinkers have hogged the Recommended Diary List for hour after hour, long past the point where I pray for their final oblivion, and I imagine that is a feeling that would be shared by a few folk here.
I have written Diaries that contained Pie, but not many. I wrote one that I later pulled because the reaction contributed nothing to the ambition to elect Better Democrats. I do not regret that, and I live comfortably with the accusations that followed.
Broadly then, my experience of this place is very similar to that of many other regular contributors. Nothing much that is stellar, that is a talent given to few. Little that is overly controversial, because that is the purpose of those who desire mainly to inflame, and that is not me; and some that have been well received as the perspective of a decently intelligent and sincere guy with a slightly different (English) perspective on the political debate here in the US.
So I do wonder at times why it is that a body of opinion, a collective progressive view, is given to quite so little sense of purpose, and quite so much intolerance. After all, we are liberals, progressives, Democrats. We are inclusive. we do not judge based on difference, we build societies, we create and we nurture. It is no coincidence that every advance that this country has made in terms of social justice, has been promoted and passed by Democrats, and opposed by Republicans.
We represent those who support the people, all of the people without fear or favour. Our opponents are not that. Yet we do not engage our opponents, well often not, we engage with each other, and when we do there does seem to be a tendency to bring out the worst in ourselves. Not always, of course. We bring out the very best too, but good news is rather less newsworthy, so we don't write Diaries about good news. I have read much about the divisions and the rancour, and much less about the genuine good information, good feeling and great commenting that goes on here; hour after hour, day after day, and the weeks become years.
While there will always be those who seek to divide rather than join together, mock instead of constructively criticise, and abuse rather than support, they are not the majority. They are also progressives and liberals, most of them, and I do feel that the pressures and anxieties that lead to discord come mainly from outwith Daily Kos, and not within.
We have a political system that, if not terminally sick, is very badly broken. That is not our fault. I would blame the Founders, but they have been dead for a very long time and can hardly be held responsible for the complete and utter fuck-up we have visited on the country since they wrote the Constitution. In fact, any mention of the Constitution really drags us down a back alley designed only to polarize opinion, rather than find a solution.
So there is frustration. The system we try so valiantly to make work for the people is sick, and appears to have mislaid it's health insurance. Maybe the sickness in the system is a pre-existing condition, it matters not ... it is, in any case, far from healthy.
So we have Democrats who try to make the system work. Democrats who think that they can play the GOP game better than the GOP. Those Democrats are not dishonest people. I may think they are a little misguided, and it helps little if one of them happens to be the President, but, in the main, they are Democrats and broadly we are on the same side.
Then we have liberals and progressives who recognise that we are constantly attempting to paint lipstick on a pig, and get pissed when the response from our friends is that the lipstick will only work if you use the correct rouge and eye-liner to go with it.
No! The pig is a pig, and it needs to become a bacon sandwich. We need a new pig that isn't a pig in a poke.
If we can recognise that there are deep and abiding structural problems, that the current system doesn't work for the people, has never worked for them and can never work for them, then there is a chance that we might start looking for real political reform, real change we can believe in, real hope that we can form a government that has the interests of the whole of America, and the wider world at heart; and not just a small subset thereof.
If we can do that, even if a few can do that because good habits are contagious, then we might actually recognise that the guy you just HR'd is actually just a friend that you haven't yet discovered you wanted. You would, by the way, also be able to more readily recognise the true foes around here, because there are some.
The vast majority of your fellow contributors are not your foes. They are in the Supreme Court, in Congress, in your State Legislatures and on your School Board. That is where the fight is. That is where change is needed. Change won't happen here, and working towards change here is compromised every time someone types "Obamabot" or other equally silly expression.
Electing Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States of America was a massive achievement. Think about that for a while. Remember how you felt because those feelings, on that day, were real. Goddam it ... We Did It!
What we also did was ignite a backlash from the Right that is unprecedented in US political life. We scared the shit out of them. What? Did you expect that they wouldn't fight back?
Remember too that in reality all we, the Democrats, did in November 2008 was mount a skinny black kid from Chicago on the pig. He is never, was never, could never win the Kentucky Derby That pig is not Sea Biscuit!
What we did was show the way. We showed ourselves that it can be done. It can be done more quickly and more easily if we can learn to live more comfortably with our own differences. Those are not going away, they actually help bind us together although it sometimes doesn't feel that way.
This is not a problem confined to Daily Kos. The HuffPo writers are on strike!. The Right suffers too. We would not like to be genuine "small government conservatives" and be saddled with the Tea Party, now would we?
The winners, and we need, America and the world ultimately needs that to be us, will be the ones who better recognise their friends, and focus more sharply on those who would do us real harm.
Thank you for listening.