Introducing a New Debate.

My blog has been vacant the last few months because I believed I had nothing new to say. To start with, I read the internet news every day and it's not making me happy.There is nothing I care to add to the flood opinions out there. The news is about getting a reaction out of the reader that is geared to making one afraid or making one's blood boil.

As a result seemingly rational adults are reduced to childish fits. Name calling and sensational attacks have replaced sensible, calm disscussion. We have reverted to the level of fourth graders taunting each other at recess. Instead of polite, vigorous debate on many issue I see overgrown children spewing anger and hatred while hiding behind anonymous screen names. It's easy to be a bully that way.

I want to stand back from these tantrums and look at subjects with a critical eye to what is missing in the discussions and engender constructive responses to them. This includes scrutinizing the media s well.

For example, our country is sagging under crushing debt, an inept congress that doesn't agree on anything and an increasingly Orwellian authoritarian state. Yet the main subject the media is concerned with is same gender marriage. This is a distraction, a diversion that is the least  of our problems.

At the same time the debate is the most important issue but not for the usual reasons. While more people realize that gays should have equal rights, it's opponents become more outrageous as they flail about in desperation. Perverts, deviants, sinners are terms we expect from medievelists not 21st century rational thinking. The gay marriage issue merely illustrates the current approach to any subject. Moral objection, rants and faulty logic instead of reason and fact.

Perhaps with this new debate we can learn once again to engage in honest adult conversation on the bigger issues -that's a good thing-rather than a selfish screaming contest.