UPDATED BELOW WITH SUMMARY for those of you in a hurry.
Definitions of internecine on the Web:
• of conflict within a group or organization; "an internecine feud among proxy holders"
• characterized by bloodshed and carnage for both sides; "internecine war"
• Mutually destructive; most often applied to warfare; Characterized by struggle within a group, usually applied to an ethnic or familial relationship
More below the fold
Disclaimer: this is not a 140 character tweet. I don't do short and simple. Take any pots of the stove, take the dog out for a walk before you start, set your alarm clock if you need to be somewhere.
I'm not demanding anything, I'm only asking you to think. Since humans are supposedly the ones with the big brains, whether "G"od wanted that way or we just got really, really, lucky - we ought to try to use them for something noble more often.
This is but one man's opinion. It has no other value. I wrote it, I will not defend it in the comments as it should stand on it's own.
Thank you.
UPDATED: What I'm going to tell you: (executive summary)
I find it bewildering that my RW adversaries all talk about the "left" as if we all get along and hold hands, when I come here lately it's like we're competing with the Right Wing self-destruction for first place.
We're all loaded for bear and pissed at everyone but us. But blogging beats ballilstics, so lets try to keep the lines of communication open so we can give the ER and the mortuaries a break.
We're not always going to agree; so lets try to be agreeable. If someone is SCREAMING AT YOU it's because he cares as intensely as you do. Don't make it a zero-sum challenge where one must lose for the other to "win" - because that usually means both parties lose.
If you feel entitled to push someone's buttons to prove what a hothead he is, don't bitch when he proves you right - you gave him the fuel.
In the end, the only real freedom we have is to get along. Let's try harder to use it.
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I refer to my previous diaries; there are no links to them. You can click on my username and spend as much time reading them as you wish if you want to know who I am and what I'm about. You can also go back through my comments and see that I'm sometimes pretty sharp with my words and emotions. People will see what they want to see, so my links to them would serve no purpose.
Having said all that, now starts my thoughts:
(the rush of people out the door can be heard)
The most maddening thing that happens in my life is when I get into a "discussion" with my neighbor across the street and he talks about the "far left", which of course I am obviously a member of because of my participation here on DailyKos. When I tell him that I only seem far left to him because the one thing I will own up to is being furiously Far-anti-bullshit-from-the-Right; I look estreme since those on the right have set new intergalactic standards for the putrid and fetid possibilities of just how badly bullshit can make one’s eyes water.
And then the grossly oversimplified amorphous stereotypes come out:
-The internet is full of lies (no truth can be found anywhere on the internets, but don’t try to teach him otherwise or he’ll tell you he doesn’t have time, but somehow I’m being arrogant and aloof for implying he’s stupid)
-We on the left are all blindly allegiant to our lord and master Markos; we can’t think for ourselves because we’re all just drones that parrot the talking points we get off the internets; and we’re (this is my favorite)we’re elitists because we’re so East coast educated that we think we’re better than "real" people.
My Neighbor, however, tells me that although his statements are verbatim regurgitation from the talking points of Fox and AM radio, that he’s a registered Democrat and he thinks BOTH sides (Left and Right) are bad, and therefore he’s not biased.
Even though he mysteriously defends only the arguments by the Right.
My neighbor tells me that because he knows 500 people by name (through his business dealings within a 100 mile radius of Hazleton PA, where he runs a vending machine business) that he has a better idea of how this country thinks, feels, and acts than I do with all my internets. He knows that nothing can be trusted – nothing – on the internets because the internets is only opinion. I specifically asked if he thought that meant no verifiable information could be found or proven on the internet and the answer was,
"Well, I don’t have the time and I don’t know the internet like you do"
And after all this – after all this incredibly inane bullshit from the people I know who think from the political Right, from all the hacks on the Media Right – I once felt comfortable knowing I can come here to the DailyKos, the place that got me off the couch and serious about caring what happens politically in this country after I saw you all on C-SPAN in 2006 – and always be able to find someone here...
...who will pick a fight with me???
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
How can we be assailed by the Reich Wing as a crowd of groupthinkers who have such blind agreement amongst each other that we can be said to have one brain with no free thought, and yet you and I know from the Pie Fights to the Hillbot/Obamabot labels to the latest round of playground assassinations that have second graders asking their teachers why adults are so childish, that there is no such universal harmony here – or anywhere on the Left, for that matter.
We thought we were/think we are watching the Right implode and consume itself, and every time I come here I think I’m in a recreation of the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan with the bullets on the Normandy Beach buzzing past my ear and shattering the skull of someone on my own team.
GBCW, TTFN, respite, rehab, recovery, therapy, solace – call it escape...
...Meteor Blades as playground monitor, bannings, excommunications – and this is all amongst the group that – according to our critics and adversaries - supposedly shares one brain, one mouth, one hand to pull the lever in the booth.
I don’t propose and can’t find on this site that I have ever declared that I have an answer to anything . I just pose existential and sociological questions that hopefully ask you to ask yourself just where you think we’re going or how we’re going to get there...when we never agree on where that could be before we slam the accelerator to the floor.
I’ve pulled back – because when character assassins pop up so regularly that it is as if Lee Harvey Oswald had a love child with Charles Whitman and kidnapped the Octomom to start a new species, what’s the point? I can’t make mine before someone who doesn’t know me from Jesus Christ or Santa Clause starts telling me I’m full of shit, or someone who thinks they know be better than their own mother shows up to say they have me figured out better than Dr. Phil and Sigmund Freude.
If everyone already knows more about me than I can defend – what room is left for anything I said?
We ought to realize that everyone has an opinion, and a lot of them will conflict with each other.
But why does ever disagreement on political, social, economic, religious or existential grounds have to lead to a zero-sum choice as if somehow a few people on a blog in 2010 are going to be able to definitively declare a winner on issues that have lasted longer than human speech?
It’s a strange trap; If I ignore my critics I’m told I’m aloof and arrogant, but if I take their comments to heart and it really causes me troublesome introspection, then I’m called a drama queen and a "terrorist" for defending myself. If I say to someone else that what they said to me really cut me deeply and hurts, then I’m assailed for somehow declaring that I am trying to dictate what people can say and can’t say.
I gotta tell you, if I ever felt so deluded that I had authority to govern people’s thoughts and words and let them drive me to a cliff rather than use such power, well then I really am a lost cause.
I’m going to end this essay with the following scene: I wish I could take the time to capture it from the DVD, but it would be too hard to capture the context any better than just the words alone:
The Movie: Jurassic Park
The Scene: A meal at a table
Present in the Scene:
Dr Ian Malcom: Mathemetician specializing in Chaos theory (a bit aloof)
John Hammond: wealthy man who has "spared no expense" to bring to life the theoretical proposal that 65 million year old DNA can be used to bring live dinosaurs to a theme park he has created to celebrate them.
John Hammond: the wealthy entrepreneur who created the park, looking for professional opinions (like Malcom's) on the viability and safety of the park before it opens to the public.
Arguments have been made that the people involved really don’t know the potential of what can go wrong; counter arguments have been made that for the sake of curiosity and investigation and study, how can we not do this thing so that we may examine it in all it’s wonder.
Dr. Malcom says – after the argument has become heated and he’s banged his fist on the desk, reminding those who are building this park that they have stood on the backs of what others have done, and not accepted the intellectual responsibility of what they are about to do.
"You were so worried about whether or not that you could, you never stopped to think about whether or not you should"
I think that’s a "tagline" that we could put into a header of every diary, every comment, and ever troll/rec button on this website.
Markos gave us a free, open, highly visible and well promoted place to express our opinions. Fact and figures can be provided, linked to, and even verified -- or so I thought until I met my neighbor, who thinks anything on the internet must be a lie just because it came from the internet. But it is true that a lot of what goes on here at DailyKos involves opinions, even when facts and links are provided.
They are but opinions, and the goal here is to shape policy, and in doing so even change the direction that our government, our country, dare we agree even our planet is heading.
But through the anonymity and distance of the intertoobz, there came over us a phenomena I refer to as "keyboard courage". You can threaten to come over to someone's house and disembowel him/her with a grapefruit spoon, shit in the hole remaining and plant flowers, simply in an excercise to see if anything will grow in a space so dead and dark...and never have to prove it, or worry that the other person who you said it to might do it to you first.
(that's my favorite).
The "shit in the hole and plant flowers" line is probably not something you'd say to your mom over Thanksgiving dinner, or to a 400 pound guy named Tiny at the local Biker bar unless you had a clear path to the exits and a loaded .44 Magnum with safety off - but you can surely get away with it here and still make it home in time to watch your DVD collection of "Friends".
Character assassinations and personal attacks upon people you’ve probably never met nor ever will are really nothing more than a high-tech recreation of the grade-school playground – only in this playground, there’s no risk that the one kid with a troubled homelife will lose his self control and level you at recess.
People are snapping like beans in this country. I’ve written several diaries on it. And it scares me more than anything else that nobody seems to care. We have become innured to it, we are
Seriously – what I’m writing here to say to all of you is that I have come to expect it – because the people of this country are so wrapped up in our newfound technology and communication and are so busy celebrating our "freedom" to say whatever we wants, that we’ve forgotten to use the brakes. And sometimes when you start down a hill, if you don’t curb your speed at the top or in the middle of the hill, by the time you get to the bottom your brakes are useless to stop a goddamn thing.
There is a lesson here.
I’m not here to be so arrogant as to think anyone is going to learn it from anything I said today.
But we’re all going to learn it one way or another.
Our founders did not give us the freedom to be liberals or conservatives;
...they did not give us the freedom to be Christian or otherwise;
...our founders did not give us the right to own guns or not to own guns;
...our founders did not give us a place where either the strong survive and the weak get eaten, or the government mollycoddles every idiot who’s too lazy to work just because he doesn’t have to (or be a safety net for those who struggled and were knocked over);
All arguments are not – must not – be a zero-sum, you-must-lose-for-me-to-win contest to the death.
What our founders gave us was a fairly rigid, but open to the possibility of modification if need be, framework where we could get along.
That's all.
Try that again, with feeling:
What our founders gave us was a fairly rigid, but open to the possibility of modification if need be, framework where we could get along.
A framework for a society where an ecclectic mix of people who may not always see the world through the same lens, could, despite their differences, live in co-operative harmony, and thereby hope to enjoy the combined fruits of their assembled labors that would otherwise not be possible were we all to go off and try to make it solely on our own.
That's all our founders gave us: The Freedom (TM) to get along, and the Liberty (TM) to respect what compromises must be made to make such opportunities possible.
George Carlin turned the Ten Commandments into One. I'm going to simplify our Constitution (and I don't think this should insult anyone, since no two people seem to agree on what our Constitution says in the first place:
Here's your Constitution:
"Play Nice".
We're not all going to agree, but we have to agree to be agreeable at some point.
Because if we don't, then the Bill of Rights can be said to have only one meaningful amendment -
not the first,
not the fourth,
not the eighth,
but the second.
That's right - the amendment I like the least, if you can't find a way to make peace with each other be it in your family, this blog, or any state in the union or the country as a whole - if we can't make peace then really the Second Amendment is going to be big in your future.
I don't own a gun. If I did, it would only ever be fired once, but I'm not allowed to be any more specific than that because it's not what people want to hear.
When I hear the TEA party eccentrics get their ten seconds on TV, it makes me realize that the Second Amendment is really the only one they think they understand - they don't know who they're going to fire it at, but goddammit they know they are allowed to have a gun and keep it stocked with ammunition for SOMEBODY.
Hey – do any of us even realize the gall we must have to keep using the word "United" in the name of our country? Does it seem as much of a joke to you as it does to me?
Does it seem ironic as tragically as it does to me that the Republican party who celebrated and takes pride that Abraham Lincoln was one of its own is threatening seccession, when it was Lincoln – a man credited with ending slavery – who said he’d let the slavery continue if it meant the country would not divide itself and the union of all the states would remain intact?
And here we are, Democrats, who fought just to endure and survive the Bush years when a president committed high crimes and misdemeanors (he lied), he committed war crimes, he started a war that somehow we have to finish and not look as bad as he did in starting it – and the country couldn’t bring itself to hold a hearing to find the truth with both hands. But now Democrats, having persevered to get control of all three branches of the government (despite the bleating of Senate Republicans, we could do what they did and change the rules and put this 60 vote supermajority out it’s misery)...are somehow suggesting that the minority is being unfairly treated.
Are you kidding me?
It was treason to oppose the president for eight years; now it's treason if we dont' start a revolution and throw out the new one.
No wonder the rest of the world hates us - we've got to look like raving idiots.
And the Democratic party has got it’s own secessionist wing of "blue dogs" and anti-abortion crusaders, and...well, I don't need to finish this list.
One of my recent diaries on this remarked on how this country at large is eating itself alive from the inside. Al Queda is not doing this to us now; we are eating ourselves from within.
I ended that diary with a call to whoever read it: "We should not be this hungry".
Well, now I say to the DailyKos – as I confess that I have surrendered my registration to Netroots10 in Vegas because I don’t know if I could swallow my toungue in person to the degree that would be required given how some people here have expressed such vitriol against me and become indignant that I would dare return it to them -
Here we are, the Koolaid Kos kids who have to suffer such pejorative nicknames from the Right because we’re all supposedly mindless drones and copycats – and when it comes to the current atmosphere of Dog Eat Dog around here – take a look around.
Even the dogs can’t stand to watch this kind of carnage anymore.
So in conclusion:
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We - whatever that could possibly mean -
This country,
this website,
your family,
your jobsite,
your church...
...any community of Americans that still celebrates this delusion that we have any claim to use the words "United We Stand" and be taken seriously –
...ought not to be this hungry to eat it's own.
In the Catholic churches that I do not attend but which populate my hometown with decreasing frequency as they are closed from lack of attendance (blame atheists like me) they turn to each other once during every Sunday service and say not "Peace be with you" -
it's a local oddity that we say
"Peace be on you."
I guess that it derived from Peace be upon you. Either way, I like it. And I don't have to be a practicing Catholic or hide the fact that I'm a militant atheist to still offer the sentiment to all who read my words.
Peace be on you.
In fact, Peace be on us all...
...because the alternative sucks.