Forgotten Beatitudes

Say what you like about North Dallas Thirty, notorious homosexualist/wrong-headed thinker/pin-up boy, but he gets a response.

Case in point, this post on his blog.

Seems that the mere fact that NDT exists and has the audacity to express his views is all it takes to reduce reasonable, competent, intelligent people (at least, I believe that’s what’s being implied by the qualification dropping at the beginning of that letter) to quivering masses of fear and panic, in fear of their lives or something.

That’s impressive by any metric, but even more so because it’s not like he’s said anything particularly appalling lately.

The fact that some busy and high-powered doctor was so deeply and fundamentally disturbed by NDT expressing his opinion that he had to sit his busy and high-powered fundament down, pick up his busy and high-powered pen and write a letter is, in a certain light, sort of flattering.

I want that!

Don’t we all?  Isn’t that why we do this?  If it was just simple journaling, we’d keep it in private books and files and never expose it to the toxic fumes of the Internet.  We all want reaction and many of us want confrontation, but are hesitatnt to admit it.

Not me.  I want someone to be so upset and/or disturbed by my very thoughts and opinions that it motivates them to express their self-righteous indignation at the fact that we share air.

I want it on paper.

Preferably hand written.

Scented.

NICELY scented.

With sealing-wax, cause that makes anything classy.  It’s like the literary equivalent of saying “Bless their heart…” and then just unloading on a person.  I think there should be sealing-wax on everything:  Computer keyboards, Starbucks Coffee cups, first dates….

The trouble is, trying to remain somewhere in the middle in an increasingly polarized environment rarely engenders that sort of response.  Mostly, you just get folks who say, “Hmm, that’s interesting,” and then go off in search of someone they can fight with until spittle flies from both their mouths and they either decend into gunplay or angry sex.

Or maybe I’m not reading the right blogs?

That’s a danger.  Over the last several months, upon reflection, I’ve noticed my own opinions skewing farther and farther left.  Not out of any sort of reasoning process, I must admit, but out of reaction to what I see around me.

I try to remain moderate and independent, figuring that a counterweight position is always a good place to start.  The issue I sometimes face, however, is that in order to attain that position, sometimes the informational intake drifts farther right or left.   Instead of espousing those views, though, I specifically drift to the opposite of whatever informational source I’m indulging in.  So, as I’ve read more and more blogs that skew right, I’ve become increasingly, shrilly left out of reaction.

This, of course, rather defeats the whole purpose of moderation.

It also makes me feel very unauthentic in my positions.  I hear myself say something and think, “God, really?  I mean…really?  How is THAT defensible?”  I tend to answer back, “Well, it’s not, usually, but in response to them, it makes more sense, so it’s relatively defensible.”  Then, part A responds, “So, what you’re telling me is that you’re adopting a position based on elemetry school playground logic AND you’re now fighting with your own conscience in the form of a voice in your head and expecting the rest of the world to believe you have the upper hand in this issue?”  Part B then crams its metaphorical fingers in its ears, screams, “I CAN’T HEAR YOU, LALALALALALALALALALALA,” and goes running off into my ID, hoping to find some spare Rachel Maddow quote to make it feel better.

So even if I ever espoused a position that might create the sort of linguistic fire that NDT does apparently just by drawing breath, should I receive a missive detailing exactly why I have no more right to exist on God’s Green Earth than a weasle (bonus points if you know where that quote’s from), instead of seeing it as some sort of validation, it would feel more like a personal attack.

Which it would be.

But I wouldn’t be confident enough in the position that brought it about to relish it.

It would just make me defensive.

I guess I’m just doomed.  Doomed to tepid response to the radical idea of balance or harsh critique on positions I’ve adopted but don’t believe in.   It’s an annoying Catch 22, really.  I was going to call it irony, but Alainis pretty much ruined that for everybody.

Still, someday perhaps I’ll get to actually bring a polar position that I strongly support out and that’ll provoke a legitimate response.  Let’s see, what do I feel strongly about:

Space Elevators…they’re elevators…TO SPACE!

Large Hadron Collider…and large haddock collanders.

Electronic Medical Records…yeah…

The absolutely suckitude of VB coding, the annoyance of XML and the irksomeness of SQL…

Hey, geeks will fight at the drop of a hat like angry little wet hens.  Maybe that last one will do it.