Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer
This last year, since I retired, I have spent a lot of time and energy on the Internet; I am officially addicted to multimedia, web chatting, and interface networking. One of the things that has become very apparent is that some people definitely have an agenda, oh yeah. My idea of a real conversation is where at least two people sit down and discuss what they think, do, have, feel, believe, have faith in, or prefer, and they express and explore these subjects with ease and an openness that includes the possibility that they may become persuaded to accept another point of view. Real conversation includes the possibility of transformation.
I can agree to disagree. I can reject outright. I can be persuasive, really. But, in my humble hope to be as honest as I can, I have to leave the door open that what I touch touches me back. If I talk with someone, that person may provide me with a life changing paradigm, a game changer. Christians hope to lead someone to Christ.
Entrepreneurs hope to persuade a venture capitalist to invest money for a promised return. School teachers explain over and over and over in the hopes that students will see the need for lifelong learning. Lovers entreat each other in hopes of creating an eternal interaction of multidimensional facets, turning a diamond in the rough into a symbolic and then real relationship for life and beyond. We all want to be heard, and the people we talk to want the same thing; it is a courtesy of communication that we are open to what those we talk to are saying. Some people, nevertheless, seem focused on hitting a target and destroying it, dominating a conversation, or otherwise skipping the small talk and going for the main event, leaving the session more like a rape than lovemaking.
With this in mind, I decided to take this to the people. I formulated an open letter and plastered it on my Facebook wall like a warning: I don’t do games, so don’t send me invitations. I join groups, but I don’t want to be “taken to the woodshed” every 30 seconds. It seems that religious people are cock sure they know exactly what the Bible says. Political people are absolutely secure in knowing the minds of the founding fathers.
Economics armchair psychologists are infinitely insightful into the inner workings of the human mind in terms of projecting what the 7 billion people of planet earth need, want, will do, and what will not work, oh yeah!
_________________________________________________________________________
An open letter to those who blog, Facebook, or chat:
It seems that some people do not enter into a community to have a discussion but rather to bludgeon others senseless with their pre-formulated expressions in order to dominate them into submission to some dogmatic way of treasuring their own sense of self-worth and ability to borrow canned-thinking from talking-heads that do the bidding of some larger entity, and so they act as a mouthpiece for some branded concoction of rationalization and plagiarized propaganda.
It is no wonder you are angry, threatening, and violent in your metaphors and suppositions; you only know how to repeat what you have heard, and you are terrified of listening to alternative points of view that might threaten your wobbly stance and incomplete logic. Most of the arguments I hear can be Googled and found on 100 websites, fully intact and quotably sounding like a sound bite of tasty understanding when in fact they are more of the same, and ostensibly worthless in a real discussion where people have honestly come to share who they are and what they think, believe, or have faith in.
runningturtle87
Furthermore, I find that everyone seems to want everyone else to just do what they want them to do and then that will fix it. We will be perfected. The one side thinks that the utopian numbskulls have some pie-in-the-sky, hippie-dippy, transcendented way of extrapolating the cube root of a pineapple and that is why they will never make a lick of sense. The droopy drawered hippy bops think that the utopian military industrial complexitron has no idea what makes for a sunny day and so they want to clip their wings and send them out for mushroom cloud pizza.
And everyone is a minister of the death of his opponent and knows exactly what to do about everything else, and when I ask if we can do this or that, they will say, “And you think that in these last 2 thousand years all of the experts missed that, huh?” Gush!
Your utopia is for the birds, mine will work. Okay. I get it. It’s your way and there is no highway, right? Nice talking with you, Sir. Madame. Man. Lady. Person. Automaton.
If we could sit down and really discuss things, we might get something done. But that is not the case. If you will just listen to me and I can ignore everything you are saying and threaten you and call you every name in the book, then I guess we can have a conversation. Oh, and I’ve been guilty of this too!
I tried to put forth the need to get rid of all the dogmas and just discuss the Bible on one debate forum and a guy came on and asked, “Isn’t that a dogma?” Yes, I guess it is.
Okay, I’m persuaded, so let’s just get technical about it all and go medieval on this, really Biblical. There are 613 Laws in the Bible. Paul says that all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Let’s not discuss it any more. Let’s let the public stonings begin. I only asked that the last one alive please turn out the light just before you smack yourself in the head.
runningturtle87
With such huge amounts of information being spoon-fed to tv watchers and bloggers, and a limitless supply of spoons of all shapes and sizes, there is hardly any need for independent thought. Or, so I’ve heard.
The media today is more like running the gauntlet to see if you can evade the pulp being put out, but I like that the Internet is still relatively free. Our worst technological step would be to stop the pipe line. ON the other hand, when I hear people spilling out their wisdom for the day, I instantly Google their one-liners and most of the time am able to find the source or even a hoard of sources that say the same thing. IT’s like smarty-pants are us comments and the first 50 pages of Google are the same one liner at a thousand sites. Utility has its price; Originality has all but left the building.