Reformed Chicks Blabbing

I’m coming out of my normal hiding place to make a few comments.
The internet is a strange place. It is often a wonderful place, a helpful place, a unifying place. But it is also alienating, cold, and is the perfect medium in which to depersonalize others.
Through it, I have seen people reach out to help strangers in need, to offer prayers and kind thoughts to ailing friends of friends. And through it, I have likewise seen ever surprising cruelty that goes beyond rudeness, venturing into the ugly and hateful.
I find it so interesting to read Facebook and Twitter updates, because people use their freedom of speech to emote about all manner of things. Among my friends and acquaintances are political conservatives, moderates, and liberals. They are Christian, decidedly not Christian, and decidedly undecided. Full quiver, no quiver, vegan and meat loving, school teachers and home educators, people from every era and corner of my life are represented there.
I do not always agree with their comments.
I do not always agree with their lifestyle choices.
I do not always agree with the ballots that they cast.
But I will never elevate my own desire to be “right” over your desire to just be.
No matter how eloquently I may speak, without love, I am a clanging cymbal. And so, my mission is to be encouraging and loving in every online interaction.
Why is it so much easier for some people to be charitable face to face than it is for them to be that way in the anonymous blogosphere? I understand that when a person creates a blog, he or she invites a certain level of public scrutiny and criticism. But why does the very semblance of human decency cease to exist when one is hiding behind a pseudonym? If I were your neighbor, your co-worker, your high school honey, would you feel quite so comfortable calling me an idiot and taking joy in my suffering? And would I deserve such contempt simply because I dare to disagree with your political leanings?
There can be peace, even among those who must agree to disagree. This is not some wishy-washy surrender to moral relativism, but a real desire to live at peace with all people, as much as it depends on me.

As you probably can tell from the lack of content this week, I had a pretty rough week. I was in a lot of pain over the weekend, my stomach was swollen which made it really hard to eat, sleep, walk and breathe. They removed 3.5 liters of fluid from my abdomen this week, so I was able to get on the Internet for the first time in a week. Not feeling too chatty though, sorry! It’s hard to blog about the cancer but I’ll try to say more tomorrow.

Not surprising since Obama hasn’t done too much:

“Politics is compromise,” says the actor, who campaigned hard for Barack Obama. But Damon feels his candidate has compromised too much. “I’m disappointed in the health care plan and in the troop buildup in Afghanistan. Everyone feels a little let down because, on some level, people expected all their problems to go away. But real change comes from everyday people. You can’t wait for a leader.”

It’s amazing how naive he sounds. You’d think he would have learned this lesson by now. The upside to the Obama election is that now naive people like Damon understand that the solution to our problems doesn’t come from political leaders, they don’t have the ability to solve our problems without creating others. I’m glad the electorate has gained wisdom from this experience

Will Republicans and Democrats come together and work on the problems with our health care system? Jon Stewart is certainly hopeful that the summit will produce a meaningful dialog on health care that can lead to real change:But of course this is Washington where bipartisanship is doing what the party in power wants to do:

After a brief period of consultation following the White House health reform summit, congressional Democrats plan to begin making the case next week for a massive, Democrats-only health care plan, party strategists told POLITICO.A Democratic official said the six-hour summit was expected to “give a face to gridlock, in the form of House and Senate Republicans.”Democrats plan to begin rhetorical, and perhaps legislative, steps toward the Democrats-only, or reconciliation, process early next week, the strategists said.After the summit, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid planned to take the temperature of their caucuses.”The point [of the summit] is to alter the political atmospherics, and it will take a day or two to sense if it succeeded,” the official said.