On Friday July 27th I published the diary, 2nd Amendment Clap-Trap and was initially delighted by the response. It was ‘Rescued’ by Kos Rangers, and bumped up until it made the ‘Recommended’ list which offered it enough prominence to receive 527 comments.
Given that it concerned regulating some of the more lethal aspects of fire-arms, things started quite well. The tone was civil, and people were helpful about errors
I tried to check on every suggestion, and Captain Frogbert’s assertion that there were actually very few guns in the Colonies did not check out exactly as he asserted and I wrote him back citing my sources.
Things got a bit dicey with Pete Cortez, who at least had the courage to sign his name, but his headline “That’s a load of crap” was a real departure from the previous civil give and take. ConcernedCitizenYouBet informed me that I had “outlawed most hunting”, even though he cited as to be banned one of the guns, a lever action .30-.30, that I currently own. I guess he missed the part where I described myself as a once fervent hunter.
I also received a lot of useful advice from JayfromPA for which I was grateful. However, about halfway down the list of entries people began quibbling over details of the Constitution, parsing grammar and syntax, becoming heated, calling names, identifying one another by their ‘political positions’ as if that was all they were. By the end of my first pass, I was dispirited, at how rapidly a fine conversation had degenerated.
I went down the list exhorting people to state their positions based on the ideas. That we have a great opportunity hear to talk to people of differing beliefs and actually hear what they have to say. The Congress has abandoned that process. If we don’t who will?
What happened exactly? Well, it might not be worth mentioning if the exact same dynamics were not currently paralyzing Congress, and for identical reasons. They are (in no particular order)
Cock-blocking---shooting someone down because you can.
Competitiveness instead of cooperation towards a common goal.
Meanness, acting as if ignorance were a moral deficit that allowed those in the know to act without respect and kindness to those in error.
The fourth is subtle, but an equal impediment. I call it “playing to your strength”---keeping the conversation bound by the areas where I feel comfortable and powerful, and lacking in courage to extend myself out into the “I don’t-know” territory, and talk from a place of real feeling.
I suspect that much of this has to do with signing on anonymously. Since I do, I should say why. I use a pseudonym because my real name is well known in a different venues. Because of that, it’s been my sorry experience that I am often the victim of other people’s ‘projections’, their ideas about who I am and what I do and what I must be like. When this occurs, they will not take anything I say seriously, and so I’ve sought refuge in anonymity. Precisely because of that however, I take great pains to be civil and polite. Some folks and I prefer not to name them, seem to go out of their way to be obstreperous.
I believe that men should stand behind what they say, unless the penalties for that will be egregious and unfair. No such penalties exist on Daily Kos, and I would urge that Kos abandon the process. The Internet itself is removed enough to make people feel bullet-proof and able to be rude. Anonymous handles insulate the writer even further. There is no better evidence for the fact that we do not feel “free” to speak as who we are, than the use of “handles.”
The premise of my piece was simple: It was a gun-lover’s call for common-sense regulations that would neither imperil gun owners nor leave society as vulnerable to psycopaths as it is. Unfortunately, mass shootings, people going postal are not rare in the United States. Homicide is an epidemic. I didn’t offer “my” solution, but tried to solicit one from a diverse group with different interests.
The first thing I noticed was several people playing to their strengths, competing on the basis of historical scholarship to make one another “wrong.” Neither advanced the conversation one iota. In fact, it blocked nearly everyone else from responding and hijacked the subject off in an unproductive direction.
Since the days of Chief Justice Marshall, the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is. Neither your scholarship nor mine is backed with sufficient power to change that, so I would suggest that it is a dead-end for the purposes of determining what’s best for society. You can be “right” and ineffective, or seek some other redress.
Furthermore, the Constitution, which figures so prominently in these discussion, is a highly anti-Democratic document. Unlike the Bill of Rights, whose partisans held out and refused to sign the Constitution until Protections for minority opinions, Free Speech, Freedom of Assembly, etc were guaranteed, the Framers of the Constitution filled it with anti-Democratic checks because they did not trust the people. (Us) Reading these pages I can see why. They are filled with vagrant passions, rudeness, drifting off point, self-serving commentary and real hostility. Who would trust the critical business of Governance to such folks?
There were numerous checks on voting, no Blacks (even free Blacks) no women, no indentured servants (which is how most people arrived in America, consigned to work seven years for a patron who paid their fare), no Indians. The Senate was an appointed body, designed to cool the fever of the Mob, and finally the Electoral College made sure that the last word on who would rule would be held by Gentlemen. It’s what we have to work with, but it is not for instance, the kind of true democracy of a Parliamentary system, and and so we do, but it was neither faxed down by God, or written by men any less conflicted and unevenly developed than you and I. Many of the people parsing it so vigorously, would have been excluded from participating under its original terms.
Secondly, playing to one’s strength is like trying to play tennis across a net strung between separate castles. Until people are ready to venture out into the unknown, to say, “I’m not sure here, but this is the way it looks to me” nothing will ever change. Walter Lippman, Bernays, all the early manipulators of public opinion, learned early on that people were moved by passions and set out to create the propaganda mechanisms in such full bloom in the country today. The complaints will continue endlessly, and people who really want to strive together for something new, will gravitate elsewhere.
I don’t understand where the mean-ness comes from, honestly. When someone says something factually incorrect how does that justify impatience, sarcasm, cruelty and disregard? Really? Who has never made a mistake? Who has ever learned anything without error? I appreciated the corrections people offered me because I did not have to eat shit to accept them. If I’d had to, I would have done what everyone else does under such circumstance--- armored up and fought back without listening. No one learns or changes that way.pas
I am sorry that after awhile I abandoned the field, exhausted. It felt to me like people quibbling with Firemen who’ve come to save their house, over the details of hoses and pumps and fire-fighting theory while the house burned to the ground. I can’t be the only one who feels my country is in some peril. It is frightening, and since my boyhood in the Forties, in one lifetime, I’ve watched America lose its pride of place and become the richest, most powerful, Third World Country on Earth, with virtually none of the civilizing luxuries---six week vacations, free college, clean, safe, rapid-transit, free medical care for all---which is the norm in every European and Scandinavian country (plus Japan) who as a result, live longer, healthier lives than we do. Our people work harder, longer, hours and are more productive than any ‘developed’ people on Earth. At the same time they receive less of the wealth they produce than in any country we might consider peers. It makes me angry and I admit that I feel more powerful when I feel angry, less helpless, but it. just doesn’t accomplish much. It’s like an endless replay of the Arab Spring where one set of thugs gets thrown out under high-talk and high promise, and another set takes over. Other than many people dying, what has really changed?
At the end of the day I began to practice Buddhism ( and am actually an ordained priest) because their practice was to leave no one and nothing out of their considerations. After some years of meditating, it was pretty clear to me that I and not my imagined enemy was the biggest part of the problem I could actually do something about.
I lived for awhile with the President of a very well-known biker gang. We liked to talk together, and being handy, he taught me how to fly-cut and bevel the gears on Harley-Davidson transmissions so that they would shift with a whisper instead of a clunk. This gave me a good excuse to be around. We could talk and he could still get his work done. One day, I was cranky about something and really dissing some ‘jerk’, and this man, a real warrior believe me, called me up short. “You know,” he said, “…for every finger you point at me, there are three pointing back at you.”
I still think about that. In his pithy way, he was pointing out that no farther away than my hand was the reminder that humanity is not separated into good-guys and bad guys. Every single one of us comes into the world with the freight of all human history. The package of being human comes with Anger, Greediness (Attachment) and Delusion. (Watch a baby) When we don’t know this, we think that the problem is “out there.” I’m a good-guy and all the world’s evil resides in Liberals, Conservatives, Hippies, Right-Wingers, Militia-types, (take your pick.)
When we slow down enough to look deeply we can see that under, the right circumstances, we are capable of doing anything that any other human being has ever done. Just think Mai Lai. Remember the government giving syphilis to black men and refusing to treat them so they could study the course of the disease. I caused a world of hurt to people when I was convinced that I was a good-guy. When I realized that I was actually quite dangerous and needed to monitor my behavior carefully, I caused much less.
I mention this because, the “I’m-okay-and-you-suck” attitude is really prevalent on blogs, even here at cherubic little Daily Kos. In an old cartoon called Pogo, about a possum in the Louisiana Bayous, Pogo once said, “I ve met the enemy and they is us.” He had it just about right. It’s a small adjustment, but its critical if we as a people are ever going to get anywhere with constructive work.
Stupid depends on the ruler you use to measure. My Dad used to say, “You can always tell a Harvard man…but you can’t tell him much.” (He went to MIT at 15) I’ve had many working class teachers who taught me to weld, to be a tolerable ranch-hand, mechanic, and perform a variety of labors my parents, who insured I got a college degree, dismissed as ‘beneath me.’ They were wrong. Everyone has some sort of genius and when we can’t see, it is us whose measuring instrument is deficient
I’ll try again in these pages, because I believe talk is better than shooting. There’s a dark future out ahead of us, boys, that could well make the streets of the United States resemble Baghdad. If we can’t get it together to treat one another better and with respect, those storm clouds on the horizon now, will break one day, and the sorriest student of history (or Bosnia, Serebenicia, Rwanda, Sierrra Leone) can see what’s coming. We will wipe out two centuries of the greatest experiment that human kind has ever made with government. No simplistic ideas of American Exceptionaism will protect us. And it’ll be our fault.