Let’s say you’re driving your car out in the Nevada wasteland. With you are three of your friends. You’ve been driving around in circles for hours and you’ve finally come to the conclusion that you are lost lost lost. So you ask your friends for help.
Mary in the back shrugs her shoulders and goes back to her Gameboy. No help there.
Her husband Tim says to you “You should have a GPS system. If you had a GPS you’d know where we are and how to get there.” Well, thanks Tim. I’ll just ask this racoon here if he’s got one.
Your friend Jack, riding shotgun, promises to help. But he just spends rest of the trip criticizing you. “No, that was the wrong way.” A bit later, “No, no, and again no.” And then, “Well, that was stupid of you. I don’t think we’re getting any closer.”
What a way to run a railroad.
I’ve done an awful lot of talking politics and reading politics. And while I used to complain about the incivility of a lot of the Conservative blogsphere, I’ve seen a lot of unconstructive behavior from both sides. And they all resemble Mary, Tim, and Jack.
Mary doesn’t feel it’s her responsibility. It’s your job to get her where she’s going, and she doesn’t think she should help at all. Which is kind of silly, considering she’s going to be standing alongside the car with you when the thing finally runs out of gas somewhere in the desert. In political discourse, this is the person who just doesn’t care about politics. They’re annoying dead weight, but at least they are quiet.
Then there’s Tim, who plays the “if only” game so he can appear to participate without actually doing so. There are a lot of Tims in politics. A lot of them say their non-participation in politics is because the system is broken. “I would vote if we didn’t have the electoral college system.” “What we really need is a true democracy.” “Politics is too corrupted by money, it’s meaningless to participate until we have real campaign finance reform.”
But really, the worst is Jack. Because Jack takes up your time and makes you mad, and he never really offers any real help. All Jack wants to do is appear more intellegent than you. No matter what solution you come up with, it’s not good enough or smart enough to rate anything more than a backhanded compliment. But he’ll never put one of his own ideas up for scrutiny. Oh, no sir!
Instead they’ll just sneer, play little word games with you, and feed on your time and energy.
Now, at some point we resemble Mary, Tim, and Jack. And that’s not a problem, really, as long as somewhere down the line we’re engaged in the process. Criticism is an important part of politics, but if all you can offer to anything is protest, you’re not pulling your weight.
For those of us who do try to be constructive — who actually want to get where we’re trying to go — the trick here is to learn to recognize Mary, Tim, and (especially) Jack early so you can ignore them when they come blog-calling.
Or at least never invite them on car trips.
