Way back when I thought Hillary would be the nominee I wrote a diary about whey it was time to go positive. Now that the nominee has been chosen I thouht it was once again time to offer tips on why being positive is a benefit.
I've decided to try to stop for the following reasons:
A) It reflects badly on my candidate if I say nasty things about other candidates. The best way to judge a leader is to look at their followers, and I want Barack Obama to be proud to have me as a follower.
B) What goes around comes around. If I attack someone else's candidate, they're just going to build resentment that will eventually come back and attack my candidate.
C) The general election is coming soon, and if we keep generating all this bad blood between candidates, the democrats will lose.
D) Negativity creates stress. Stress not only for the posters who attack one another, but I feel stressed when I see my candidate get attacked. Stress is not good for any of us; it releases toxic chemicals into the body, is linked to all kinds of health problems, and even contributes to obesity. Do you really want to feel stress everytime you come to Daily Kos? Is that really how you want to spend your Christmas holidays and New years? If not, let's build a more positive environment
E) The main reason I'm a progressive is because I'm a pacifist. It's hypocrtical to be a pacifist while you're attacking others, even if only through words.
People say politics gets nasty around election time and there's nothing you can do. Well I don't believe in that kind of defeatist thinking. We have the power to make politics and the progressive blogosphere a shining example of friendly rivalry and civil discourse if we just remember to treat each candidate and their supporters the way we want others to treat our candidate. In other words, let's all make an effort to follow the golden rule, and that means let's not recommend negative diaries and negative comments (regardless of whether we agree with them or not) and let's start troll-rating people who are not treating candidates with dignity and respect. Instead of saying I don't like candidate A because they voted for X, say, I like candidate C because they didn't for X. This will benefit us all in the end.
To paraphrase Martin Luther King, I have a dream, that one day people in the progressive blogosphere will tell me who they are for instead of who they are against. As Martin Luther King said, the arch of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. The reason we are progressives is because we believe the world can be a better place. Let's prove it, right here, right now.