I don't mind discussing, debating, or even arguing politics. In fact, I love it! And rallying, joining together with like-minded people is great. However, some people take it too far. On Facebook, I became a fan of "Being Conservative." With Reagan for a profile picture, you'd think the group made distinguished posts and warrant good discussion. Unfortunately, that's not usually the case.
A recent post by the "Being Conservative" group stated, "Dear Obama: take 2011 off and don't come to work. 'Like' if this is one of your New Years wishes." This post turned into an outlet for my fellow discontented conservatives to voice their... disapproval of our president. I understand the need for an outlet, but got fed up with the seeming lack of thoughtful, issue-related comments. So, I thought I'd post my comment here as well to share my annoyance.
Look, I don't like President Obama either, but my friends and I have more mature discussions about him and other politics... and we're teenagers! If I were a liberal, I'd look at these comments and think, "What argumentative, insulting, broken records these conservatives are!"
Obama is liberal, and the most pro-choice president we've ever had. But he's still the president, and comments like these help no one. The American people woke up a little during the last Congress election, and we're not helpless. Let's use our passion towards something useful - like research, writing, intelligent discussion/debate, protests, letter writing... something more productive than showing a nasty face to our fellow facebook users.
I know I'm younger than most of you, and I'm sorry for the lecture. I just get frustrated when I see a bunch of unproductive, immature comments on political issues. I get even more frustrated when the comments are coming from my fellow conservatives, since they hinder our cause more than help.
Oh, and this comment doesn't apply to those of you who are just happy to imagine a world without the negatives of Obama and aren't supplying useless immature comments. There's a difference between rallying and spouting unintelligible words. Sometimes that difference is a fine line.
Maybe I'm taking it all too seriously, but I think most of the other people who commented weren't thinking enough.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
2 comments:
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The frustration with immaturity and white noise in political discourse is understandable, such noise is rather unavoidable. In any subject that deals with real, tangible frustration and despair there are going to be those who are not abled at being productive within their movement and instead release that despair and frustration in a rather unseamly and brutish way. I think it's good damage control to have such behavior channeled into a single public forum, like that of a FaceBook group (in retrospect, I'm guessing you found your expectations for that group to be a bit silly), rather than interfering with individuals and their discussions; the more you can separate and dichotomize the noise in your movement and the discussion in your movement, and the more you can consolidate the noise and spread wide the dicussion, the better off your movement is. But just because a certain amount of noise will always exist doesn't mean it's not a worthy goal to reach out to these people and attempt to able them to be productive or at least not destructive in an effort to reduce that noise.
ReplyDeleteJust keep leading by example (in all areas of life) and producing words rather than noise and you'll have done your part. Sometimes when frustration is running high it can be (for me at least) difficult to avoid immaturity, but just think back to whether the movement you're supporting is so unimportant that you can risk damaging it and do your best to avoid that damage.
God Bless.
P.S. Props for being conservative.
Thanks for the comment, Adam! It's encouraging amongst all the political mud-flinging we find in casual discussion and media.
ReplyDelete