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I spent the better part of two days helping people move into the arena right near my office, setting up temporary offices right outside my door for displaced attorneys in LA who have been trying to protect legal rights, working on cases that I won't get billed for in order to help displaced attorneys ensure that the justice system goes on, and donating my most recent paycheck. What I have seen of the gratitude of the people and the sadness of their losses will remain with me for a long time. When I saw the attitude on Metafilter as I relaxed and dropped by, I was angry. And I realize that I am sick of it. It isn't worth it.I told him that I hoped he'd come by again after things had calmed down, but that I completely understood why he felt the way he did. He's far from an impeccable commenter, but I don't see many impeccable commenters around here. I see a quite a few partisan name-callers who can't accept a difference of opinion without making it personal, and I wish things could be different, because I value a good argument a lot more than I value pious chants of Kum-ba-ya.
As to the current disaster, I think you'll find my political rhetoric as it relates to this to be more strident than most. As always, I respectfully understand and try very hard to comprehend opposing and quite different viewpoints than mine. But I am very angry right now because I am certain that the national response would have been almost immediate if the victims had been predominantly white and middle-class. You know that I don't see things in black-and-white and I rarely think that anyone, regardless of their ideology, is actually evil and intends harm to other people. But, in the same way that people like my sister (a conservative evangelical minister/missionary) believes that there's a current running through American culture that is poisonous and from which evil springs, I, too, believe the same. I just identify a different current. And, in this catastrophe, I believe I see a direct product of it. So of course I'm angry, and of course I'm "against" some people.We'll see how he responds to this. Anyway, if anyone is a partisan hack, it's Rothko. The reason he's here is so that he can say strident, predictable, and provocative things in an atmosphere where he will be applauded. Dios is here because even though he disagrees with the majority, he thinks we're intelligent people worth conversing with. He takes an enormous amount of shit for being different while Rothko deals out a lot of shit and then whines when he gets in trouble for it. I know whose character I admire and whose character I don't.
You might stop and consider, if you've really come to know me in some ways, that I'm one of the least partisan people you'll find. I despise partisanship because it essentially puts tribalism in the form of ideology ahead of reason and pragmatism. What I am, is a rational pragmatist. And try to believe me when I say that my anger, my moral anger, is the product of this worldview and is not partisan.
Yes, it's hard to tell because the things I'm saying are the same things the partisans are saying. That happens sometimes.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 1:07 PM on September 2, 2005