Senin, 16 April 2012

Noise!

There are days that I wish I had been born in a different era. Any era will do on those days because all I’m looking for is an escape from the noise. I get tired of the yelling and screaming online and in the media. I get tired of bureaucrats speaking in a language none of us understands and who work overtime trying to socially engineer our societies with politically correct doublespeak and regulation upon regulation for even the most mundane things.

I get tired of politicians pretending to believe in something just so we will elect them and even more tired of the sanctimonious and divisive rhetoric that spins out of that from their supporters. Much of that noise comes from folks who have bought into the fantasies spun by them and that’s all it is much of it is now…..noise.

 We have successfully turned our freedom of expression into a form of ideological slavery.

Oh, I know. We’ve had some form of government since the dawn of time and I’m sure the folks living in caves divided up into left and right political ideologies. “Kill the T-Rex  - “No. It’s an endangered species and we need to protect it.” And I’m equally certain they had some kind of primitive bureaucracy to support the tribal council, some faceless group to ensure that all spears and clubs were properly registered and that the tribal elders got their share of every root foraged or mystery beast killed for dinner.

What they didn’t have was the constant yelling and screaming that passes for informed discussion and debate these days. My God but it gets tiresome after awhile. The entire free world is capable of taking one fact, it doesn’t matter what it is, and exploding it into days and weeks of arguing, accusations, conspiracy theories and, of course, countless accusations about the perfidity of the opposition.

And here’s the really stupid thing. Most of the time, whatever that issue was gets forgotten almost as quickly as it emerged once a new one shows up. Remember NDAAP or SOPA or RoboCall?

Often the accusations have virtually nothing to do with the original issue and you’d have to invest a considerable amount of time and energy trying to find some facts to debate. Instead it’s all personal attacks. There is no sense of proportion anymore and everything is a threat to someone.

Here is something I have learned that may help you wade through some of the overwhelming noise. The more personal the attack, the more threatened the attacker feels because they really don’t have much upon which to base their opinion. 

I’ve reached a point where I have simply accepted that there is no point in discussing anything with people like this. They don’t listen to anyone but themselves or those who agree with them and there is nothing to be learned from them. 

Debate is an excellent way to learn. It offers the opportunity to challenge your own opinions by looking at, and discussing, facts from a different perspective. You can’t have that debate with people who start from a position that has no factual basis or who think that debate means clobbering their opponent over the head with ill-informed opinion and personal attacks.

To me, it is no different than racism and religious intolerance. It is opinion and belief based on emotions rather than factual information. Like being anti-gay, it’s just another form of intolerant prejudice.

Often, with these people, the language is so over the top, it becomes impossible to consider it let alone take it seriously. Too often they use an issue as an opportunity to open up a debate on something else and pick over old scars.

Some state governments have recently passed or are attempting pass legislation to change abortion laws. That is an issue worth debating. There are real consequences to those decisions and we should be discussing them. Instead of debating the issues and the wisdom behind those decisions, the left has characterized it as a ‘War On Women’ and the language quickly moves from discussing a serious issue in a serious way to yelling and screaming that the Republicans hate women.

How absurd is that?

Within days, Hilary Rosen, a Democratic strategist, utters a poorly phrased but otherwise harmless comment about Mitt Romney’s wife never having worked a day in her life and the right fires up its troops and declares that it is the left that is actually at war with women. The rhetoric escalates and the stupidity is that both sides have successful and intelligent women. Getting around that to prove one side or the other hates women requires a certain amount of verbal tap dancing. Day after day, pundits, politicians, bloggers, mainstream media scavengers fuel the war until the rhetoric is so loud, you can’t hear yourself think and certainly not about the original issue.

Remember that issue? It was abortion but nobody is talking about abortion are they? Instead, they are yelling, screaming, sneering, accusing and labeling the other side and the original issue, which should always be treated with consideration by both sides, is long forgotten.

And we wonder why we never seem to move forward.

The simple fact is that issues like abortion are contentious and difficult for both sides of the debate and both sides of the debate have valid concerns. The only way these issues can be resolved is by consensus and there can be no consensus when people are using words like weapons designed to hurt and intimidate each other.


I watch this constant flow of anger and derision and often find myself wondering if most of the people involved ever stop to think that it is their fellow citizens and not some foreign enemy they are attacking.

They are people just like you and I. They have families, jobs, believe in democracy and many, bless their hearts, have even been known to laugh out loud now and then. How does having an opinion that doesn’t agree with our own suddenly make them, not only the enemy, but less than human? Have we really lost that much of a sense of civilized behaviour and respect for the opinions of others?

I think we have and I think it is born in fear and insecurity which we hide behind intolerant and accusatory rhetoric.

We’re like frightened animals trapped in a corner that lash out and snap at anyone who gets close when they feel threatened. In this case, it is our opinions that are threatened and we are afraid because too many of us lack the confidence in those opinions to debate them without anger. We all have opinions and in North America we are free to voiced them but instead of voicing our opinion with confidence, we attack and denigrate the opinions of others. It shows not only a lack of the same respect for others that we expect and demand for ourselves but a lack of confidence in the opinions we’ve formed.

I think we need to reacquaint ourselves with some of the fundamentals of democracy and one of them is that just as we expect our opinions to be respected even when others disagree with us, so too should we be respecting those with whom we disagree. When the time comes, we vote and the majority decision dictates the decision. Yelling and screaming doesn't change that and accomplishes nothing except more anger, yelling and division.

I grant you some opinions are so stupid they aren’t worth much consideration but that doesn’t mean we have to go out of our way to treat the people who hold those opinions as an enemy of the state.  We don’t gain anything by that other than to create a climate of hostility and intolerance where people talk at others rather than to others. It breeds mistrust, anger and polarization….

….and that, my friends, has been the undoing of more than one civilization in the past.


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