Equal Opportunity Offender

            Welcome to America where you can be as offensive as you want to be about whatever point of view you have. As long as you aren’t punching people you are more then welcome to call them a pinko-commie-hippie-liberal-baby-killer and as long as you’re not sending them death threats you can call somebody a right-wing-fascist-woman-hating-fundamentalist-Neanderthal. Freedom of speech, baby! Oh yah! It’s a beautiful thing!

            The best part is that no matter what you’re point of view you can find enough people and “facts” to back it up and make yourself feel superior over the other side. You can find enough statistics, reports, and scientific data, to prove your point of view all day long. And don’t worry, since you have all that, when somebody brings up an alternate point of view, opposite data, or a question you can’t answer, there are enough politicians out there to teach you how to sneer, laugh condescendingly, and let the other person know that the data you’ve collected is totally unbiased and that their data is wrong.

            It is so easy to get caught up into the political, and religious venom in this country (especially during election time) and forget that we’re dealing with real people. Every four years we are either Democrats or Republicans. Liberals or Conservatives. Red or Blue. Nobody has names only sides. That person at work who we used to chat with about Dancing With the Stars is now a buffoon because they won’t vote for our guy or see things our way. They don’t see the world they way we do therefore they must have some kind of mental disability. Okay, that’s harsh; they are just ignorant and uneducated.

            So yes, you can be as offensive as you want. You can Facebook, Tweet, blog, Tumblr, whatever you want. You can post as many ironic pictures with funny tag lines attacking whatever core values of whomever as much as you want. You can pride yourself for taking a stand and letting the world know how you feel.

            And you won’t be changing a damn thing.

            When you get into a fight and somebody pulls out a knife the rules change. If you have a knife you pull it. If you have a bigger knife you pull it. You react to what gets tossed at you and you have to go bigger. Ideological debates are no different.

            The Right has a news station so the Left needs one.

            The Christians have blogs so the Atheists need them.

            The Democrats have attack ads so the Republicans make them.

            Bigger. Better. Faster. Stronger. Louder. That’s what we have to do in order to “beat” the other guy. We don’t have to have all the facts just the money and the megaphone and people will believe it. We have to make the world a better place for all the people so we have to attack those who disagree with us.

            Do you want to change somebody’s mind? Go buy them a cup of coffee and ask them why they believe what they believe and then shut up. Nobody believes what he or she does by accident. Maybe that Democrat grew up on food stamps and WIC after their father died in battle. Maybe that Republican was nearly aborted as a baby and worked his ass off to make her company a success. We all have our reasons and they are not usually better then anybody else’s.

            I grew up in the 1980s Evangelical church (and yes, I still believe in Jesus). If you were a Christian you voted Republican and that was it. If you voted Democrat then your conversion to Christianity was obviously fake. Now I work in a very liberal environment where if you vote Republican you obviously didn’t go to college and you’re a knuckle dragging, religious nut. These sentiments have led me to neutrality for one major reason: both sides really feel like they are doing the best thing for the people at large. If you sit down and really listen to somebody from the opposite side that you’ve placed yourself on you’ll usually be surprised at how articulate, thought out, and honest they are. They are not your enemy they are human just like you. They don’t hate like you think they do they just see the world differently because of the life they have led.

            Social media has destroyed this. We now judge people by what they post on line. We feel as though we know their whole life story and what they believe because they “like” Mitt Romney on Facebook or #Obamarocks on Twitter. That’s narcissistic bullshit. It is impossible to know somebody through this. It’s impossible to make a perfect opinion on somebody when all you see is them ranting with impunity.  

            Of course there are the stereotypical nut jobs out there that make both sides look bad and it’s the media’s job to put them and their out of context sound bites all over the web in order to fuel a position. There are people out there that just love to hate. They are ignorant, they are loud, and they don’t represent real people. Experience tells me they are the minority.

            I really don’t care who you vote for or which side you lean. I probably disagree with you on a lot of issues and agree with you on some others. La-di-frickin-da. But as tensions rise what I want you to remember is as you rant, rave, get passionate, and freak out, people won’t be changed by how loud you are but how much you care about them.

           

            Oh, and when you take the gloves off, don’t bitch about getting a knuckle sandwich.

                                                                        -D.Ex