Posted by
Michael on Thursday, November 08, 2007 9:34:06 PM
I wrote a column about the tiny bruhaha that erupted over my post-Virginia Tech column, and it ran in the last issue of Madison Park Times:
Several
bloggers laid fire to my post-Virginia Tech column, "We Must Stem the
Flow of Guns," originally published in the May 2007 edition of the
Madison Park Times.
A reader who runs a blog on townhall.com,
wrote an entire short essay rebutting my piece, cleverly entitled "The
Outdated Second Amendment." The reader was a rather eloquent essayist,
and I must say he laid into me in a verbally adept way of which I am
not used to being on the receiving end.
His major contention
with me had to do with my claim that "no one was responsible enough to
own a handgun." He was admittedly right to lay into this, as it could
be interpreted as a blanket statement calling a large group of
Americans irresponsible, a statement that could, in and of itself, be
irresponsible.
The reader said, "If we extend that same
rationale to the rest of the Bill of Rights, then neither is anyone
responsible enough to have or voice an opinion on issues of national
interest, decide their own religion for themselves, determine if
they've been wronged by government and should seek redress, or anything
else. All those aspects of liberty should be dictated, I suppose, by
trained professionals. It would also indicate that Powell evidently
considers the founding fathers misguided in their trust of the people."
Ouch.
When
one is accused in American political debate of thinking the authors of
the Constitution were misguided, it's meant to sting. If your beliefs
are contrary to the ones held by those who founded the country, then
the whole value of anything you say begins to come into question.
GETTING PERSONAL
While
I got excited about the fact that my article was being taken so
seriously by a reader, that feeling began to deteriorate. I was as
diplomatic as someone like me can try to be, but soon it became quite
apparent that things were getting personal.
I was disappointed
to see personal e-mails that I had sent in response to his own being
posted without my consent. For the reader, the subject seemed to have
become less about the issue of gun rights and more about me.
I
didn't even start to look at the comment thread to the reader's post,
which I imagined would be filled with some very nasty words about me.
The whole thing was a bit bizarre, because I'm just one guy living in
Seattle writing on a keyboard, who never claimed to be the epitomy of
modern-day conservatism.
While it seems like a couple of guys
that might have gotten a little bit obsessive, at the core of this was
the issue of debate: Are we going to debate the issues, or are we going
to play Gotcha in hopes that we will win over another person? Are we
going to solve problems or turn against each other?
I am
certainly no beacon of perfection, but it seems there's already a lot
of negativity and misery in the world, and we'd be a whole lot better
to try to be a little civil to each other.
Michael Powell can be reached at mptimes@nwlink.com. He also has a web log at mopowell.blogspot.com.