I’d like to think I am a tolerant man. I like Docudharma partly because of this toleration. There are few rules, and what rules there are are largely sensible. It’s not a single mission blog, like some others, and so there’s a great deal of freedom to explore what some people might consider the “wacky and crazy”.
One of the reasons I spend more time here as of now as opposed to anywhere else in terms of participating on the internet is that I find most or many ideas that aren’t palatable, at least tolerable, and that this benign toleration is preferable to constraining conversation and trying to create a community where topics that are “off-mission” are grounds for being banned from a site.
And, being a hermit, online community is important to me. One of the things that strikes me is if you think about it, most of us have people in our own lives who are dear friends and family members who hold views that we might consider crazed.
I once had an eminently accomplished and deeply analytical friend who thought that the Earth was 6,000 years old and that dinosaur fossils were placed in the earth to lure people to Satan.
I have a family member who is a conservative Christian, committed adultery, married the woman he committed adultery with and divorced his wife, and once told me that my being gay was an abomination because it was “selfish” and that I was denying all my manifest charms to a woman. Apparently there have never been any limits on a person with such a history judging others while refusing to look at the “plank in his own eye” to employ a Biblical phrase.
I had a friend who came over unannounced at all hours, and called me up all the time for help, and finally what precipitated the end of our friendship was his trying to introduce me to the joys of crystal meth.
And, as I have said more than once, I have one sibling, a dear brother, who remains dear to me, who thinks among other things that the problem with Democrats is that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are too darn liberal and thinks that gay people shouldn’t have certain civil rights because it would “cost the taxpayers money”.
So, yeah, I’d like to think I am a tolerant man. The reason for me pointing out the above examples is to posit that sometimes we will tolerate a lot more in terms of bug-eyed battiness from family and the people we care about and adore in person than some people do on blogs. And that is the reason, I believe, that Docudharma cultivates viewpoint toleration as a social good. I know, there are some who believe that Docudharma is a “nutty fringe” website. This, I believe is worth the price, because when you start shutting down discussion you start losing good conversation and good ideas and anything that might result from that.
What I feel most of us realize on Docudharma is that people are more than the sum of their words on a blog. It is the totality of their existence that matters, and further too many other blogs forget that, to the detriment of forming the communities that are going to be the backbone of the liberal movement.
There are on this site people who appear to believe that the Illuminati are real and that the biggest problem we have today is a shadow government that is about to take over the world. There are others who seem to believe that global warming is a hoax and that vaccines cause autism and that 9/11 was a conspiracy.
Honestly, I don’t care.
Dr. Jennifer Potter, Director of the Women’s Health Program at Fenway Health announced a health fair for LBT women on May 11 in this morning’s edition of Bay Windows. That will be in the midst of National Women’s Health Week.