Please Shut Up!
I believe in only one thing: liberty; but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.
~ H.L. Mencken
"You talkin' to me?!"I recently placed a dear old friend on the "Blocked Senders" list in my email account. I'm close to adding another. Why? Because they are part of the growing cohort in our society that take it upon themselves to be evangelists in the darkening wilderness that is America's political landscape today.
Day after day, these friends pollute my inbox with all manner of lunatic fringe bombast just shy of endorsing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the DaVinci Code, Mein Kampf and Helena Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine. They send links to articles attesting to Barack Obama being the spawn of Satan, on the need to replace the federal government with the NRA, on saving the economy by reverting to the gold standard, on the merits of genocide in addressing the opposing party, and promoting the virtues of sending eight-year-olds to work in tax-exempt coal mines.
Why do some people feel it their divine mission to spam their friends with ideological screeds? Do they feel the recipients are sympathetic to their automotonic nostrums? Or, do they fancy themselves on a latter day mission civilizatrice to convert us unwashed masses to their cause? Back in my student days, it was the lefties who were constantly in my face, ranting with hash-fueled fervency on the need to drive the bourgeoisie onto collective farms before bashing their skulls in with dull shovels. Today it's righties who advocate raising just enough taxes in order to build concentration camps for liberals as the final solution in their hellbent quest to return America to 1955.
I don't get it. Maybe aliens from another galaxy slipped a mickey into earth's drinking water. Perhaps a mass hallucination a la Jonestown has seized half our population. In their just published book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, conservative scholars Norm Ornstein and Thomas Mann describe a Republican Party that is "...an insurgent outlier -- ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition."
Whatever. As a militant centrist who reads the papers, listens to NPR and votes based on issues and individuals rather than on tribal hysteria and Orwellian groupthink, I'm perfectly capable of making up my own mind based on information I glean myself. Therefore, dear friends in political cloud cuckooland, would you please just leave me alone and shut up?