I agree wholeheartedly with your analysis and statement. It is the fact that we are all supposed to be on the same "team", so to speak, that the name calling and posturing gets to me.
Friends can sit down and discuss anything from sports, through religion to politics and beyond and disagree, while still respecting each others opinion. Sometimes you may change a friend's mind, or your mind may be changed, or you may simply agree to disagree.
The same should be true when you are speaking with FRiends posting here, and it doesn't sometimes.
Allow me some "soapbox time" now if you will:
On the old border thread there was outright hatred due to the comments of one or two posters who liked to bandy the words BIGOT and FASCIST around, thankfully they are gone, but it created an atmosphere of distrust for contrary opinions.
Added to that problem is the problem of being a too strict in one's ideology and adopting an ACLU-like attitude towards rights, instead of trying to see the sitution from other angles and trying to actually understand why certain posters feel as they do concerning the "rights" of those they see as enemies, traitors, Quislings, etc.
It all begins and ends with September 11, 2001.
It is easy to quote the Constitution and fret about the rights of alleged American citizens, it is not easy to sit there and listen to such a defense when someone lost friends and relatives in the slaughter.
It is not easy to stand idly by and worry about the rights of certain people when someone believes that they are somehow in league with the spawns of Satan that flew thos planes into their innocent targets and killed thousands whose ONLY crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I believe strongly in the Bill of Rights and the entire Constitution, but I also believe that we need to adjust ourselves to the fact that we are now living in a "New" America, and accept a loss of some freedom for the greater good of all Americans, with the hope that those freedoms will be fully restored one day, when the evil has been eradicated, not jailed, GONE!
Those of you who disagree with me go ahead and rebut me, but don't ping me because I will not debate you on this, I will NOT change my mind.
A real American understands and cooperates with the tough, nearly impossible job, faced by our country to protect us within our country, and unless you experienced a personal loss on that "Black Tuesday", and smelled the odor for weeks afterward, and watched the barges of debris sail by on a daily basis for weeks, thaen you cannot tell me I am wrong in how I feel.
The Muslims at the border should have just shut their mouths and dealt with it, like good Americans who understood that the country had changed...
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
We now return you to your regular programming.....
With pardon to Yeats, I ask the tolerance of those on this thread to humor me by listening with me:
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre; The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert. A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
We know what rough beast has come..may God help us all to fight it.