Turning Down the Rhetoric

I have this urge to stop taking politics so seriously. A couple of things have happened to make me think this is a good impulse.

While listening to talk radio today, the host and a caller were all in a lather over…well I don’t know what they were in a lather over because I have no idea what either said. Both raised the level of their shouting in direct response to the other so it was impossible to decipher what all the yelling was about. Even though it was only radio, it was not difficult to imagine the two as breathless, red-faced, spitting, vein-popping caricatures of what we believe is wrong with the other side. Neither made any sense and neither advanced their argument other than the argument that people like these two shouldn’t be allowed to have an argument.

The second thing was a friend who worked with Kellen and me in New Zealand had her own Blog that was full of whimsy and the occasional political viewpoint. Politics was only a natural area of discussion for her as she worked for a political party. Even so, she was very careful what she wrote about and kept many of her stronger opinions to herself. She is only 19-years-old but far more insightful and knowledgeable than most people twice her age.

After the election in New Zealand, the usual raiding of campaign staff occurred and a few were given full-time jobs working for Members of Parliament. One of the former campaign staff had his own Blog and he was prone to the occasional rant. A few weeks after meeting his new colleagues in Parliament, he decided to write about how ineffective and lazy they all were. What should have been to nobody’s surprise, the Blog was circulated among the offended staff and he was fired over the written slights. Which brings us back to the other Blogger. After she read his post, she wrote about it and provided a bit of advice to him by opining that he should have given his new workmates a bit more time before rushing to judgment.

Believe it or not, this battle of the young Bloggers made it to the national newspaper, which generally causes all people engaged in politics to panic. Our friend was asked to remove her Blog and never Blog again, lest she had a desire to look for other work. Now the Blog is shut down and something that I looked forward to reading every now and again – if only to keep up on the local gossip in Wellington – is gone.

It kind of makes you wonder how something as simple as expressing an opinion gets this kind of notice. I guess it only makes sense when you put this in the context of politics. I have this theory that everyone can do simple math unless you put a dollar sign in front of the numbers and suddenly two plus two doesn’t add up the same way. Makes you wonder if the same twisted logic applies to politics; that everything makes sense unless you put it into a political equation. How else can we explain the profound differences that seem to separate one half of the country from the other? Both sides can't possibly be so right or so wrong.

Yeah, I know, I just wrote about 1,000 words on WMD in Iraq so I suppose I have little room to complain if people disagree with me. But for every “fact” contained in that post, anyone could just as easily come up with their own counter-arguments and post their own response (Oh! How I would love to have a comment posted!). If I was so lucky to have a comment, it wouldn’t be long before I was pecking away on my keyboard looking like a breathless, red-faced, spitting, vein-popping Blogger. And that’s no way to go through life, is it?

So, for now I will calm down a bit on the rhetoric. I don’t expect many to follow, but if I can just take it all a bit less seriously, I could better suppress the desire to live where there is no talk radio, no Internet, no nightly news, no newspapers, and, especially, no Bloggers.