12:31pm June 25, 2011

A few additions

In my last post, I was focusing only on the parts of the communities in question that are quibbling endlessly over things like I described.

I want to acknowledge that there are plenty of other people in these communities working tirelessly to make things right for as many people as possible. Or just being all-around decent people. Who are not part of this. I don’t at all mean to make it sound as if everyone is squabbling over nothing. Lots and lots of people are doing anything but, and as much as it’s important to say what not to do, it’s also important to be able to say a lot of people are doing a lot of things right.

I also want to acknowledge that I know that from within a lot of these quibbles, things look a lot different from when a person is taking a step back. I know this from experience. I just involved myself in a mostly pointless quibble this past night and it felt really important when it wasn’t at all. Worse, a lot of the issues I described aren’t pointless in some ways. It’s like… yeah, it’s pointless to sit there trying to define other people out of your idea of a perfect utopia or something. But at the same time, there’s a lot of history between the various factions that form. And it’s not easy to walk away from those factions and step aside and say “Hey, I’m done.” Especially when your faction formed because of another faction attacking it in ways that were simultaneously pointless and created huge, real problems for the targets of the attacks. And at that point you can be in the position of defending your existence, from people who want to make the world think you don’t exist and don’t count. And that can be a huge thing.

So I don’t want to be so simplistic as to say any of this is easy, either. Not with the long-entrenched people sitting on different sides of fault lines in fear or hatred or even mortal fear of each other. But if people are going to survive, we need to find ways to pull together and work for each other’s survival instead of against each other. And that’s not easy, but it’s necessary, and only going to get more and more necessary. And this is in all communities, not just the ones I was talking about in my last post.

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