Chuck, you and I are the same age. I believe that the increasing of loss of respect you are speaking of is a direct result of the anonymity of the Internet. People feel free to say things they may or may not say to someone's face. But, that can cut both ways. Anonymity can make people free to speak unpleasant truths as much as it can make people free to speak slanderous libel. I would submit that, while the latter is not desirable, the former isn't necessarily a bad thing. Truth is almost always better spoken than not.chuck j wrote:I can only speak from my heart , only speak frorm 63 years on this earth . Only speak from experience , I speak my truth , yours may be different . Explain to me that I may understand ?
I disagreed with the OP's position in this thread, but until the point he said he was going to do something unlawful (re-enter a location where he had previously received effective notice) and get it on youtube, I thought I might be differing with someone who was operating on some kind of internal logic that could be understood as simply a differing viewpoint, even if I didn't agree with his logic. Up to that point, I could disagree respectfully. That all changed however when his parting youtube comment made it plain that was not the case. He doesn't have a logical viewpoint. To paraphrase Kennedy administration Secretary of Defense McNamara - OP doesn't have a viewpoint; what he has is some kind of horrible spasm. Hence my response "Oh...... you're one of THOSE people." He cannot be reasoned with because he does not WANT to be reasoned with. In that light, if the rest of us (the editorial "us") are guilty of anything, it is guilty of trying to reason with a fundamentally unreasonable person who does not want to be reasoned with, and who evades reason when confronted with it. By engaging with him on the assumption that he was a reasonable person, we got conned. Shame on us for that, but shame on him for being unreasonable........and deceptive.
He is putting on a big "pro-open carry" show in this thread, but his previous posting history shows him to be avidly against open carry. That's where the deception comes in. So, we are confronted with someone who [a] operates outside the constraints of reason, and sets out to deliberately deceive about his intentions. What are we supposed to do with such things?
You spoke, correctly, of the diminishing mutual respect in our culture. But there is another thing which has changed drastically since you and I were both young. It used to be that when logic and evidence showed a person to be in the wrong, he or she would be convicted in their conscience of the wrong, and they could then admit they had been wrong. And ADMIT is the first step on the path to redemption. Someone who is big enough to admit when they've been wrong, is big enough to change their behavior. Witness that the OP has deceived us about his views, and in fact has given us notice of his intention to (allegedly) repeat his behavior unlawfully. It really does cause the observer to call bull on the whole thing. Personally, I am left with the following possibilities:
- Possibly he has made it his personal mission to destroy open carry. He doesn't like it, and so he's going to wreck it through deliberately unlawful behavior that will cast open carry, and the people who open carry in a bad light.
- Possibly he is just "twisting the tiger's tail" in the practically guaranteed anonymity of the Internet, getting a rise out of people who have made the mistake of giving him enough respect to take him seriously, at face value. In that case, who is disrespecting whom?
- Possibly he's just stupid.........which I don't believe.
- Possibly he's just angry about something entirely unrelated, and this is how he's venting.
But for sure, he has a belligerent attitude. That's not disrespect on my part, it's a well-considered observation. I don't need it. You don't need it. We don't need it. People who are belligerent deserve whatever happens to them. Taking his threat at face value to break the law and youtube it, he deserves whatever happens to him.
I am in favor of open carry. What I am NOT in favor of is people who are poor ambassadors for the 2nd Amendment.......particularly during what is a critically sensitive time, when a new expansion of the 2nd Amendment has gone into effect, and the eyes of Texas are upon us.
Let us be worthy of the attention by behaving with sober reason. The OP is not displaying sober reason in either his words or actions.
