A Mid-Year Resolution

It is certainly good advice to try to avoid becoming dispirited for no good reason. So I have made a mid-year resolution to stop (most of the time) reading the appended comments on political articles I read on  the web. It has gotten too depressing.   The usual thread will contain  some combination of meanness, vulgarity, bigotry, parroting of prefab talking points,  grossly faulty  reasoning, moronic unintended hyperbole, blind dogmatism, or writing poor and ungrammatical enough to earn a bad grade on a fourth grade composition (in the old days of course), and occasionally  all of them.  There sometimes are interesting, thoughtful, and well-reasoned posts on these threads, but I find too few to make up for wading through the rest.

I hope the people leaving comments are not a representative sample of politically interested adults in the country, just as I always hoped the nitwits on man-in-the-street  comic segments on TV shows who could not tell whose picture is on the five dollar bill or remember who was president three years ago were not selected randomly. I don’t know if that is a forlorn hope. I do know the writers  are in one  way representative of the diversity of opinion in the country. I’ve read  garbage from leftists, conservatives,  communists, neo-confederates,  race hustlers, feminists, America haters, flag wavers, ordinary  religious zealots, green religious zealots,  fascists, socialists, Democrats, Republicans,  conspiracy mongers, and plain old  nuts of indeterminate ideology.

I’m (mainly) quitting because I’ve done it enough. I suggest that others do the same only after reading enough of the stuff at a variety of sites  to understand what is passing for discourse in many  places these days.  That is useful information.