Quiet

[rowyn]

I spent Sunday with a couple of local friends, Corwyn and Ysenda. Well, nearly local friends, at least. Their apartment is in another town, and it's about 45 minutes to get there from mine (an hour if you get lost along the way and need to call to get fresh directions). Ysenda is only sort-of local because she's going to college in NYC now and was only home for winter break. Which is nominally why I went to visit them, since she'd be home. Of course, in the three (four?) years that I've known her and she'd been living there, I'd only come to visit them once before. I'm such a homebody.

The weather on Sunday was lovely, especially for January in the Emerald City area: clear, little wind, and 67 degrees. After lunch, we weren't very motivated to go back to their apartment: better to stay out and enjoy the nice weather. My friends drove down to the downtown shopping district for their town, and we got out to walk around. There were a startling number of neat little shops, making the experience a lot more fun then walking around a mall. I've been in malls from Victoria, Canada to Orlando, Florida, and y'know: they're all the same. But downtown shopping districts often have some variety to them.

Instead of window shopping, we went inside several shops to browse through clothing. In the "vintage clothing" store (whose prices weren't much higher than the average thrift shop, as it turned out), Corwyn entertained himself by finding the most garish and appalling clothes to show off. (Corwyn, holding up a yellow, blue, and orange dress with the colors flowing together down it like melted wax: "What do you think?" Me: "It looks a little small for you.")

At an eclectic dress shop, whose offerings mixed the hand-made creations of its owner with manufactured lines from overseas -- mostly India -- Corwyn found an Irish-American gentleman to talk to. I half-listened to their conversation as I flitted in and out of the dressing room, trying clothes on and looking at things with Ysenda. Corwyn discussed a variety of topics with his new aquaintance: politics, where Corwyn is emphatically liberal and the other man decidedly conservative, and religion, where the Irishman proved to be Catholic while Corwyn is an atheist, or perhaps agnostic. (And an ordained minister, but that's another story). Though they agreed on almost nothing, the conversation remained civil, good-natured and friendly throughout.

After his conversational partner had left and the shopkeeper was ringing up my purchases, the shopkeeper confided in us that it had been quite an effort to restrain herself. "I so wanted to get into the thick of things!" She said. "I love talking politics! But I would've been too strident."

"Oh?" I said. "Which side would you be on?"

"Your friend's, of course. I'm the extreme end of liberal on just about everything. I didn't agree with anything that conservative had to say."

"He was a very polite conservative," I said.

"He was," the shopkeeper agreed, and my friends nodded too. "You don't meet that many good-natured conservatives."

"I don't know," I said. "I'm a conservative, too. I'm just quiet."

"You are not!" she said, touching my arm in disbelief. "Are you really?"

"I really am," I said, smiling. "Maybe you meet a lot of good-natured conservatives, and they're just too reserved or polite to argue with you."

And I wonder about that, now. Is the real reason that we think of the "other side" as characterized by strident hotheads that most of the polite ones keep quiet? Not that the majority of people hold moderate views, or don't believe in the same extremes that the ferocious ones do. But that the majority doesn't want to be confrontational, so they only speak up when they think they're among their own kind. So the liberals think "all" conservatives are blowhards, and conservatives think "all" liberals are vituperative, because most of the people who'll speak up in the enemy's spaces are ones like that.

And the civil ones keep quiet. "I don't want them to think I like that."

Comments

[gleef.livejournal.com]

And I wonder about that, now. Is the real reason that we think of the "other side" as characterized by strident hotheads that most of the polite ones keep quiet? Not that the majority of people hold moderate views, or don't believe in the same extremes that the ferocious ones do. But that the majority doesn't want to be confrontational, so they only speak up when they think they're among their own kind. So the liberals think "all" conservatives are blowhards, and conservatives think "all" liberals are vituperative, because most of the people who'll speak up in the enemy's spaces are ones like that.

I'd say that's almost certainly true, and a good way of putting it :-)

[telnar.livejournal.com]

Rowan's way of putting it explains a lot, if not everything. I've been exposed to some partisan rants in environments which appeared to me to not lend themselves to helping the ranter to predict whether the likely audience would agree. If the sample size were large enough for me to say something convincing (which it isn't), then the ratio between liberal and conservative rants might say at least a little about the relative stridency of those groups in that area.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I often worry about that. I do not want to be loud and obnoxious. But I also fear that by my continued silence all the time on so many things, I'm letting the loud and obnoxious ones rule the day.

In some of the LJs that I follow (and other forms of keeping up on things), I can count on rants that ... well ... I disagree with. But so often it'll be something like, "So-and-so sample conservative is such a nasty person!" or "So-and-so sample Christian is so absolutely obstinate and outrageous!" Oh, if it goes too far, and the person might extend these rants to cover Christians or Conservatives in general, I might timidly note that I fall within those groups ... but it's typically a case of, "Oh well, I didn't mean YOU."

I don't count. At least not there. But largely just because I keep my mouth shut most of the time. I'm not much of a "positive example" to offset the bad ones, if my major contribution is silence. When I actually DO open my mouth on a topic, it's typically because I'm riled enough on a topic ... and so I'm just contributing to the phenomenon. (I spend more time at Panera Bread Art Jam gatherings complaining about something than I do talking about positive things, despite my best efforts to check myself.)

There's a tremendous pressure to stay politely silent. The only thing that seems to overcome it is when I just can't stand it anymore - and therefore I'm likely to come across as irrational. Never mind that I simply can't dedicate the time required to be fully versed on all the latest articles, all the latest "facts", and all sorts of things to be able to carry a decent argument.

And it's not like I should expect that I'm going to be asked my opinion. And on those rare occasions when I am, I suspect that, really, it wasn't wanted. (Or, in the workplace, not going to bring it up because it's not - in my opinion - work-appropriate.)

I know people who seem very civil in person, but if I were to go entirely by LJ, I would get a very different picture. I suspect that it must be part of this phenomenon: Taken out of context, anyone can seem just a bit unhinged - especially when you're looking at it from the other side, the side that disagrees, and therefore less likely to be very charitable in interpretation.

I don't believe that the majority of those who disagree with me are boogeymen, monsters, or any such thing. (However, my admission on this part doesn't provide any proof that I'm not a boogeyman or monster. I can't very well present an unbiased accounting for myself on that.)

I want to blame the media for a lot. I habitually check cnn.com, my.yahoo.com, www.reuters.com, news.bbc.co.uk, www.usatoday.com and (gasp!) www.foxnews.com daily. So many times, the headline is a bit misleading ... or I'll find several versions of the same story, each one leaving out a few bits and pieces I can find in other articles that can give quite a different impression. I think there's a sort of mentality, perhaps subconscious, that stoking the flames is good business. People who are riled up are more likely to tune in, buy magazines, give hits on web sites, and so forth. Calm people might be too tempted to focus on, you know, other things.

[level-head.livejournal.com]

I might be seen as a raving lunatic based upon my LiveJournal political entries. But in person ... well, I am much like my LJ, I think. ];-)

===|==============/ Level Head

Headlines

[gleef.livejournal.com]

So many times, the headline is a bit misleading

It's worth noting that in most media outlets, the headline is written by a completely different person than the article. Usually one of the editorial staff has to come up with many eye catching headlines on a tight schedule without having time to fully digest the stories, so even if there is no editorial slant, headlines can be grossly off. For the outlets with substantial slant, it gets even worse.

[krud42.livejournal.com]

And on a media level (rather than a personal level), you're not going to get people's attention with articles about people agreeing to disagree, or two opposing viewpoints working together for a shared goal; it just doesn't sell ad space.