Why I Blog Here

I talked to a lady on the plane last week, she was coming back from an Alaska cruise. Her husband had died last year at 81, and she looked like she was going to go ahead and enjoy her final years. Funny story about the pool table, I won't go into it here. I was reading John Dean's new book, and she asked me about it.

I explained that I had picked up the book because I'm a social psychologist, and the book was about John Dean discovering some classic social-psych research and applying it to the current situation. She was from Ohio, a retired teacher.

We talked about things, the craziness, the nuts running the asylum, and she said, "But you know, there's just nothing an ordinary person can do about it."

So I told her about Teach the Facts.

The truth is, there is something an ordinary person can do about it. You can't stop America from invading and occupying random countries and torturing and killing people, and you and I can't really do anything about corporate corruption or global warming, but sometimes they try to bring the fight into your neighborhood, into your community, and that's where you can put your foot down. You can go to meetings, you can speak up, you can ... go on the Internet day after day and keep saying what needs to be said.

We get lots of visitors here every day, hundreds and hundreds. Of course we have logs on our server that show us where people come from, what search terms they used to find us, whther they've been here before, which pages they looked at, whether they commented or not, so we have some idea who these visitors are. We know that people appreciate what we're doing, that people from all over the world are following our fight. We can tell that certain people who ought to be worried about us, are.

We have a little community of commentors here, and the situation sort of mirrors the nation. Our own members tend not to comment too often, maybe once or twice a day we'll hear from someone in our own group; mostly it's other people. We have some commentors who really consider what they're saying and, whether they represent a liberal or conservative point of view, there is a civil discussion. We have a couple of people who are just plain hard-core gay-hating Bush-loving radicals, and a couple of them have, at times, actually tried to explain their point of view. They usually throw up their hands in frustration, because most of us just don't share their basic assumptions. At least they try, and they are appreciated.

Then there are the nutty ones, and the trolls, who don't know the difference between a discussion and a stream of insults. Sometimes I delete their comments, but most of the time I let them stand, if only to give a clearer picture exactly why Teach the Facts needs to exist, and why I need to write something here every day. Sometimes their comments are astonishingly insulting to the rest of the group, and often reveal an ignorance so profound that there is simply no point in responding to it. At times their words are so personal and vile that I refuse to keep them here, and then you see an announcement that "The administrator has removed this post." Unfortunately, there are days when these people dominate the discussion through sheer persistence.

To bring this discussion around, let me point out that this is the same thing that has happened all over the country, the reason that TTF has to exist in the first place. The loudmouths wore the rest of us down. You don't want to respond to it, for one thing because it's embarrassing to get involved in these childish discussions sometimes, but you have to. Because if you don't, official policies will be changed, your kids' education will be undermined, your community will suffer like so many others have.

I lived more than fifty years of my life without anyone ever referring to me as a "liberal" or a "lefty." I'm just your ordinary country-and-western-guitar-picker-with-a-PhD kind of guy, I got two rebellious teenagers and a mortgage and a cell phone that doesn't work in my house and a couple of burned-out lightbulbs in the family room that I'm going to change someday. I didn't set out to start any crusade, and I don't care to lead the charge.

But everybody has to step up this time. The mindless haters have taken over the country, and it's up to us, the people, to take it back.

In blogging here, I am faced every day with my own feelings and thoughts. Tell you the truth, I never gave gay people a second thought until I got involved in this. Contraception was just something you got if you weren't married or didn't want to have kids, it never occurred to me that people were going to make such a big thing out of it, and I never gave that a thought either.

I'm not here to promote condoms or to advance the cause of gay people. I'm here because I don't think some self-righteous idiots ought to be telling other people how to live. But because I'm doing this, I have to figure out, how do I really feel about these things that I always took for granted? What are the actual facts of these situations? I'm not here to provide answers, but to find them.

Recently, when I referred to "nuts and trolls" in a post and then mentioned that they call people names, somebody in the comments tried to nail me for being hypocritical. Because, oh horror, I called them names, too. But you know what? --I don't care. The country is being overrun by nuts, and somebody's got to say it out loud. I'm not going to let them be the only ones who ever land a blow. Name-calling is not an end in itself, but let's not pretend we're dealing with rational people here, OK?

As an election comes up, I'm sure cautious politicians will want to aim for the center where the votes are, and steer clear of inflammatory rhetoric, and I understand that. I hope they win, good normal serious citizens who want to go to a lot of boring meetings and make important decisions, cool.

When it comes to our schools, I don't want to see anybody win my mushmouthing their way through the debates, trying to make everybody happy. Somebody's got to say, we want to have high educational standards, we want our schools to teach the facts, we want our schools to teach our students to be tolerant and inclusive and kind and moral. They don't need to leave things out of the curriculum, just to humor the nuts. We can't let our country go any further down that road.