I viscerally and physically dislike controversy and confrontation, though I have no trouble with in-depth discussion of controversial issues.
I find this election cycle – the tenor of the convention speeches, the rancor and polarization, the distortions and evasions, oversimplifications, cheap shots, mischaracterizations, and all the rest of it, from both sides - makes me something like physically ill. Anxious, hyped up, edgy. It all makes me feel much more intense than I like.
It's something like despair.
I try to stay away from coverage, blogs, opinion, analysis - and watch only the principal speeches - but it all draws me in with the morbid fascination of someone watching a slow-motion car wreck almost against his will.
So rather than listen to the sides talk about each other, I'm doing my homework in more primary sources, and I hope to be fully enough informed to separate each side's wheat from its high fructose corn syrup.
Against my better judgment, I'll probably have something to say, I hope in a much less loaded and partisan atmosphere than these threads have offered, and I hope later rather than sooner. (But I could fall off that wagon...)
I think peoples' minds CAN be changed in forums like this, particularly in forums like this where we know something of each other and respect our mutual goodwill and intentions to really communicate. (You know...for the most part, and that's not to say the poison doesn't penetrate here too, and infect the best-intentioned of us.)
But nothing is accomplished by cheap shots or short soundbites, or brief presumably clever restatements of the stock positions so widely available in blogs, reader commentary to news stories, viral email spam, coffee-shop and water-cooler blather.
When we're mostly interested in making points, finding the pithy joke, and substituting cleverness for thoughtfulness, we just preach to the choir and alienate everyone else.
I know self-righteous moral indignation feels good, and we take satisfaction in landing those punches. I've been guilty of making too strong a point on too little basis, with too little consideration for others, too many times – and I apologize. That's part of what upsets me about this stuff. It's too important NOT to talk about, and often too volatile, too divisive to bring up.
What makes my gut churn, my chest ache, and my skin crawl (literally), is the thought that regardless how carefully some few deliberate and discuss, in the end, our choice as a nation will be based on just the kind of caricatures, distortions, and cheap shots campaigns in the last couple of decades have invariably degenerated into.
Maybe democracy never worked all that well, and votes have always been up for grabs by the glib and the clever in exchange for pandering and deceit. Maybe it only seems worse now in comparison to days of yore because with more behind me to remember than ahead to anticipate, I polish history to a golden lustre.
Maybe it's always been about leading the masses around by our noses, one way and another. Maybe that's why some look on democracy as the tyranny of the lowest common denominator, the rule of rabble.
I just don't see any other form of government that seems to work better. Which is why I feel such despair when we fall so far short of our own ideals.
I feel like we're being torn in two.
