The Culture of Conflict

I had a very disheartening experience last night.

I belong to a dating website called okcupid.com. I haven't had a lot of success there. Met my second wife through it, not sure if you'd call that success or not the way that things worked out. But anyway, the site will occasionally pick three people out that it thinks that you'll like for your "quiver". Sometimes it's off and sometimes it's WAY off.

So last night i was looking at my quiver matches and quite enjoying one of the profiles. She's a teacher, which i dig. She's articulate and seems intelligent, both of which are good. She has a cute nose. Then when i got down to the section about TV shows that she watches she put "FOX News (LOL)". I wasn't sure what that meant. I mean, if i told anyone who knows me that i'm an avid Faux News viewer they would say "Yeah, right" realizing that i was being sarcastic or ironic. And she had said earlier in her profile that she was looking for someone who shared her dry sense of humor. Okay, so she's being ironic.

Then a little later, she said that one of the things that she enjoys doing is trolling Yahoo News on the internet and leaving comments just to "piss liberals off". Okay... so her "LOL" after FOX News wasn't meant to be ironic and i was back to being confused about it.

This got me to thinking about the culture of conflict that we have in this country that's preventing us from moving forward, and Faux news viewers are not the only ones responsible. Both democrats and republicans (i won't say liberals and conservatives because i don't feel that these parties represent those ideals anymore, if they ever really did) have fallen into this pattern of just getting up in each others faces and refusing to budge. Republicans are just better at it, because today's democrats are a bunch of wimps who tend to fold like a birthday card whenever the republicans want something. I just don't understand it, frankly. If you have two people trying to go somewhere and both refuse to move, guess what doesn't happen? Both sides seem to have the intellectual attitude of "shoot first, ask questions later" and i personally can't think of a worse way to get information. Ask your questions first. Get your information first.

Then shoot.

I will say, though, that it also confuses me because she's a science teacher. Anyone who watches Faux News on one side or MSNBC on the other shows a blind loyalty to one party and a blind refusal to listen to the good ideas of the other. And i can't figure out how a science teacher can blindly support this party. This is the party who supported Scott Walker, who wants to balance a state budget by cutting the pensions of teachers. This is the party that insists that the non-scientific non-theory of "creation science" be taught side-by-side with the scientific theory of evolution. This is the party that insists that global climate change was dreamed up by Al Gore in 2000 to destroy American business.

So i guess what i'm asking is that we get past this habit of digging our feet in on stuff and start compromising enough to move forward again.

Peace.

Randal