Okay, this is disgusting......

[patgund]

Taken from karenbynight's LJ. You know, I don't care what your political beliefs are. There's supposed to be something still in the USA called "Freedom of Speech".

And vandalizing someone's car because you don't agree with their political viewpoints is NOT freedom of speech, but rather stupidity at it's worse.

Have we become so polarized as a nation that this is how people's viewpoints are treated? Were these stickers such a threat that it demanded that thousands of dollars worth of damage be done. Have WE GOTTEN THAT SMALL AND NARROW MINDED?????

Is moderatism dead anymore, replaced by black and white newspeak?? By hate speech and media lying??

This is not the US I want to return to.

Comments

[firedrake-mor.livejournal.com]

UNfortunately, there are parts of the nation that are JUST that narrow. If this person is, as it appears, in Seminole County, Florida, it's terribly conservative. No, this is not right, but there are parts of the nation just this bad. I understand from another friend that Joplin, Missouri is also this bad.

As far as media lying is concerned: Unfortunately, because most of the media is now controlled by major corporations, and they're concerned mostly with profits, not truth, they're unwilling in some cases to criticize the evildoers for fear of losing their "access" to the big story.

As you know I've bellowed about before, there's no room for the moderate!

[jj-maccrimmon.livejournal.com]

Sadly, this person lives in Florida or Floriduh, as several of my friends there call it. The particular area they live in is not the place of laid back, gentile attitudes. This is fearful, repressed land o'redneck wonderment.

In such a place they have two strikes against them already:
a. they are gay
b. they are pagan

Personally have no difficulties with those who live the gay lifestyle. It's their choice - and no threat to me, my sexuality or my concepts of how to live. Unfortunately (as evidenced by the recent Trading Spaces show with the psycho uber-Christian mom) not everyone can see their way to live and let live ("Love as Thou Wilt").

As for the pagan (goth) stickers and those being nailed as well, this reflects on common fears that because they don't "fit in" with mainstream (read: Southern Baptist) religion in the area. Yes, it sounds like kids doing it, but I don't think so. Kids wouldn’t have been so discrete in which stickers they tagged. They would have gotten them all if they’d meant to cause trouble. Selective tagging, means someone older with definite attitudes on those subjects, i.e. someone with a personal agenda got them. This kind of shit takes time, so someone in the complex they are in should have seen something. They should ask the kids in the hood what they saw.

I plan to repost this to my LJ too. Intolerance and stupidity should not go unpunished.

[duckflambe.livejournal.com]

As it was pointed out in the two posts above, US freedom is not distributed evenly across the nation. Maybe we could come up with a way to measure freedom like we do the cost of living index? That way, if I ever have to move again, I can pick the right location. :)

[karenbynight.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. You seem to have taken somewhat the opposite message from my post that I meant to give. Yes, it was an ugly, ugly act. Yes, it was clearly meant to stifle someone's personal expression. But it was a single act of vandalism, which was responded to with reasonable interest by the police. It doesn't prove anything, in a nation of 286,000,000 people, other than that one of them is a dick. It definitely doesn't prove that free speech is dead, that moderatism is dead, that liberals in the south are in danger, that the country you will return to is small and narrow-minded.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

What you heard in part was my fustration at stuff like this happening, rather than a comment on your post per se.

And yes, a very real fear that moderatism is dying in this country.

[karenbynight.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's frustrating. But cultural context is everything. Our country has a long history of the extremist elements screaming loudest, so if your contact with it is limited in some way, it's easy to get the impression that there's no middle ground. I personally believe there is, but in any case, I don't think there's good evidence that the amount of middle ground has changed in the last several decades. If vandalism of bumper stickers and the Patriot Act say something broad and ugly about America's character in the 2000's, then WTO riots, OJ Simpson, "welfare mother" racist anti-welfare smear campaigns, Watergate, the Kent State massacre, the wide-spread adherence to McCarthyism, and so forth say brod and ugly things about America's character in prior decades.

I don't actually believe that it does. Instead I believe that America, like feminists and christians, has the problem of being judged by our ugliest factions, small but loud. This fall huge numbers of Americans took other people in, sent money, sent things, helped out when the hurricane hit New Orleans. They didn't stop to ask if the needy shared their political views. I just heard the other day that a group of people from the Rainbow Gathering (annual hippie camp-out) has been camped out in New Orleans since the week after the hurricane, serving free meals breakfast, lunch, and dinner to hundreds of people -- anyone who shows up. One of the guys doing it said it was no trouble; it was actually easier than doing it at Rainbow gathering every year because the location was much more accessible than the national parks the camp-out is held in. I only heard that on NPR, though, and nowhere else. Good news doesn't sell.