Parent's political rants.

My neighborhood can be a diverse one. We have all manners of races represented, from Asian to Latino, from African-American to Caucasian, and any other ethnicity you can think of. The HOA sports homes from the middle class to the gated wealthy elite if you will. It should come as no surprise then that various politics, religions, and cultural norms differ amongst us.

The community has their own web site complete with a discussion board where people can post about their upper class problems. Usually it's littered with things like restaurant recommendations, missing pets, and reports of vandalism and other misdemeanors. A lot of it is amusing to read as seeing people get all worked up about white people problems never ceases to be interesting. I never knew how people parking their cars on the street was such a divisive issue until I moved there.

Yesterday an admin posted a topic about how annoying his father's politics are. Mostly he's disgruntled by the fact he gets numerous emails from him about how all Democrats are socialists and secretly want a Pol-Pot style of government. Some contain jokes that are less than politically correct and are never funny. His question to those who cared was how do we deal with political divides in our family.

My answer was to never engage in discourse with someone who takes politics personally and to just let it go. His politics may differ, but we all want a prosperous country, regardless of the methods. I'm lucky in the fact that even though my father and I disagree on a lot of things, we can hold a reasoned debate, possibly come to an agreement, and even if we still differ we hold no disrespect towards one another. I'm not that arrogant to believe that everyone must think like me in order to be a good person, even though I'm right about everything.

Still there are those I can't even begin to understand, such as those Tea Partiers who care less about democracy and really desire to establish a Christian theocracy. Then again they are fun to follow, sort of like watching animals at the zoo.

The thread took many twists and turns with people trying to theorize why it seems their Republicans friends and family fill their inboxes with all sorts of factually inaccurate nonsense about birtherism and the like, but don't see much from the other side of the aisle.

Then one person came up with this gem:

"As for someone's politics, just get them using Facebook, friend them, and then they'll post all matter of nonsense and assume you're reading it but you don't have to. Problem solved."

I have all manners of FB friends, both liberal and conservative, who for whatever reason feel the need to inundate my wall with news articles about things they feel I should know. Keeping with this culture of sound byte information, a lot of them have taken to write a sentence of two explaining their thoughts on the news item of the day. Most try to be witty and the majority of the time fail at doing so. This is why I love the Hide function, the perfect passive/aggressive way of not offending someone.

Now some friends do offer some pearls of wisdom, while most...well...don't. Still it gives those who feel the need to pontificate about issues they know little about a way to look smarter than they really are. Annoying to some as it may be, it's better than being flooded with emails about how Sarah Palin is a moron.

"For some reason, my liberal friends do not send out emails with bad jokes in them. Maybe because we have a Democrat in the White House." - A poster on the thread.