[This article was originally published in Balancing Act: The Newsletter (No. 127: March 2010). Reprinted with permission.]
I can understand people getting upset with me when I write about controversial topics. I'm a provocative guy, I like to poke people, love to make them think. When it happens to me, I write a letter to the editor, or the author, or the keeper of the book of truth (Wikipedia). But I keep on reading.
Recently, a guy vituperatively ended his (free) subscription to Alan's Monday Morning Memo® because I had cast aspersions on attempts at collaboration. My point, in less than a single paragraph, was that most such attempts are purely conceptual and theoretical, and many times the collaborator often merely wants something you have.
Well!! My ex-subscriber went into a snit because his company had "collaboration" in its name, it was always good, always laudable, always to be sought. He ranted, ungrammatically, that "I should had a more open mind."
Perhaps. But perhaps he could have engaged in a discussion with me (I had 20 favorable comments on the piece and only his negative one), or challenged me back, or used my blasphemy in his own blog to show how benighted I am. Instead, he called me names, put his hand over his ears, started yelling "yayayayayayayaya," and ran away into the night.
That's what happens when you cancel subscriptions, end memberships, stop visits, and otherwise bail out once you've heard something that threatens your belief system. How strong and well balanced is your belief system if a contrary view drives you to hysteria? There are people threatening the New York Times and Golf Digest and Stamps Magazine every day with non-renewal and cancellation over some perceived threat or damaging remark. Maybe they should read more carefully and try to intelligently determine a) if they are right to be outraged, and b) how most effectively to react if they are right.
Can you imagine a board meeting where every opposing view is met with shouts and refusal to listen to the other side? Pretty soon, you'd have the South Korean parliament, where they tend to throw punches and chairs over legislative disagreements.
A healthy condition seems to me to be one where we listen to opposing views, consider their merits, and make reasoned decisions whether or not to change our own. We can then feel free to try to enlighten the other party if we believe they are laboring too far from the street light at dusk.
But to act as if decency itself had been offended, the lords and ladies endangered, and society teetering on the brink, and then turn your back and slink off into the crepuscular depths, well, that's too much like those monkeys covering their eyes, ears, and mouths.
Other opinions aren't evil. And running from them is simply stupid.