Still proud – Aug 21, 2012

6 Responses to Still proud – Aug 21, 2012

1. Still Proud – NEALO · BEERORKID says:

   August 21, 2012 at 6:25 pm

   [...] posted with permission From NEALO.COM [...]
2. Sal who saw your piece at FARK says:

   August 22, 2012 at 8:49 am

   Then you should probably feel bad you weren’t able to do this on your own, without the false manipulation.

   And you should come to understand that your message of tolerance should include any of the right wing, tea party, bitter white guys, Christian people that you may have thought ill of, or spoken against during your demonstration.

   And maybe look a bit more into how well your critical thinking, critical analysis led you down a path that many other people, liberals even, thought looked suspicious from the get go for many rational reasons.

   And consider how poorly the media covered this story since the media should have been perhaps the first to report critically (in the best sense of the word) about this.

   And how easy it is for you to be manipulated by others. Consider how easy it was for you to be manipulated and think back to other times when others, including the government, have tried to manipulate all of us. 9/11, War on Iraq, sure those are easy. Think deeper about other times peoples have allowed themselves to be manipulated and you were moved enough to demonstrate. Maybe you were wrong then too, and maybe your demonstrations helped buttress some truly evil stuff? Could that have happened to you?

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3. Sal who saw your piece at FARK says:

   August 22, 2012 at 8:55 am

   I apologize for the duplicate post, I was trying to eliminate a word I thought may have triggered the moderation queue. This hoax is being discussed at FARK today, I won’t post the link because I want to post another link, and I don’t want to be considered by WordPress to be a spammer.

   But here is an article in Inside Higher Ed about Hate Crime Hoaxes from July 31, 2012

   http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/07/31/hate-crime-hoaxes-present-burdens-lessons-college-campuses

   It’s an interesting article and gives even more perspectives on your cartoon….

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   neal replied:
   August 22nd, 2012 at 9:00 am

   No problem — I have it set up where I have to approve a person’s first post, and I just hadn’t gotten to yours yet. I couldn’t tell from a glance if there was a difference between the two, so I just approved both in case there happened to be a meaningful difference. Want me to take down the first one?

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   Sal who saw your piece at FARK replied:
   August 22nd, 2012 at 9:09 am

   Sure, that’s fine. And sincerely, thank you for being so courteous about it all. The FARK discussion, which contains a lot of FARK inside politics itself and can be very rude, but like so many such discussions can be enlightening and educational (and addictive) is here: http://www.fark.com/comments/7280696/When-faking-an-attack-on-yourself-to-bring-LGBT-community-together-you-might-want-to-do-more-studying-than-old-CSI-episodes.

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4. neal says:

   August 22, 2012 at 9:27 am

   Anyway, Sal, to get to your first post, it’s probably kind of easy to project onto these demonstrations based on what one might expect to hear, evidenced by your reference to the people that may have been spoken against at the demonstration.

   These gatherings were overwhelmingly positive. The comments and speeches and signs were of support and concern, not retaliation. It’s easy for someone to sit there and urge restraint while assuming these demonstrations were something they weren’t, but they were remarkably restrained, mature and positive.

   A city heard word that someone had been brutally assaulted. The people’s response was not to attack; their response was to recognize that others within this city were now terrified something like that could happen to them, and they gathered to tell the rest of the city “That type of violence is not Lincoln. Don’t be afraid.” The skepticism surrounding the initial story was probably more widespread than you realize, but that didn’t mean the fear that resulted and the concern for loved ones was any less real.

   It was a beautiful response then, and it still is now.

   The accuser’s actions will no doubt have implications, and they will probably damage the cause that she was trying to help. But that’s a separate issue. She is going to have her day in court and what will happen will happen. Some people are ashamed and embarrassed that they were duped and that they came out in support of something that now appears to have been made up. My belief is that they should be proud.

   I’m glad you made the comparison to the “manipulation” surrounding 9/11. I’m kind of surprised you think peaceful vigils in a park are analogous to attacking brown-skinned people on the street, vandalizing Mosques, invading another country or voting for the Patriot Act, but the comparison is useful for the contrast. Had these folks gone out and burned a church or the local Tea Party headquarters or whatever, that would be very different and I’d agree with the condemnation.

   But they didn’t. And so I don’t.

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