This
recent blog post from
Andrew Sullivan was a reply to a tirade from John Cole, author of the blog
Balloon Juice. Andrew Sullivan is the author of The Daily Dish, a blog courtesy of The Atlantic, the literary and cultural commentary magazine focusing on foreign affairs, politics, and the economy as well as cultural trends. According to to it's
website and
Wikipedia page, the magazine that was first founded back in 1857 is primarily aimed at a target audience of "thought leaders." While "thought leaders" at first made me quite discouraged due to it's ambiguous nature, I then became zealous since I couldn't think of any semantic term that was nearly as creative as "thought leaders". It's simple yet intriguing.
Let's visit
the original post, bitterly entitled "Under Assault," a good example of what I think is one of the society's biggest problems and unfortunate facts: that sadly, everyone is so easily able to jump to far fetched conclusions that justify rude and reckless banter and behavior based on incomplete narrow-minded perceptions. Instead of choosing to take just a minute to consider the very likely fact that life is not always what it seems to be, most people consider themselves a great judge of character and actions of those they have never even met.
The worst of Cole's rant lies in his third "argument":
3.) The fundamental thing you need to understand when talking to deficit hawks is that when they say something is painful or that cuts will hurt people, you need to recognize that what they really mean is that the cuts will be painful TO SOMEONE ELSE and hurt people THEY DON’T KNOW AND WILL NEVER MEET. That’s why it’s so easy to be a condescending asshole about the budget. That’s why it takes nothing to suggest raising the retirement age for Social Security. That’s why, after taking a month off from writing on the internet to recover from a cold, he can tell people who work back-breaking manual labor every day of their god damned lives for much less money than he or McMegan earn that they should “contribute” more to their health care costs.
I'll save myself by not diving into the political squabble over health care cuts and Social Security retirement age changes and instead focus on the truth that is: Cole doesn't know what he's talking about when he attempts to personally attack Sullivan. He assails Sullivan for taking a month to recover from a cold and not blogging during his recovery. I guess Cole, who has nothing better to do with their time (wait--I don't want to be a hypocrite, should I erase that?) than sit and count the days that Sullivan is MIA, thought that Sullivan was purposely trying to leave his readers high and dry. Sullivan, who has been HIV positive for 17 years, was not just recovering from a cold. His asthmatic lungs caught a triple viral, bacterial, and fungal infection resulting in Sullivan losing half his t-cells in a month. Attached to a nebulizer, he was unable to breath even while stationary, but Sullivan fought this illness for three weeks until he recovered.
Let's all go get Sullivan and hang him to a cross--why not?
Even worse is when Cole adds
WAY too much information about his own health in an attempt to glorify his ability to blog (yes, he bragged that he could blog) even under the most dire circumstances (that being tearing his shoulder bones--or should I say, "launching his humerus through his scapula, shattering the latter into multiple pieces." He martyrs himself, describing his heroic act of blogging "non-stop for two months with his left hand" since his right arm was
bracefully awaiting corrective surgery. While the last thing I can do after preaching about how much I don't appreciate people who assume things about others is assume that Cole wasn't in as much pain as he has woefully described. I must wonder, though, how on earth did he break his elbow? Why didn't he include his sob story about how we was the victim of an attack, or even the victim of the sidewalk? My guess, since he couldn't omit even one small detail about his injury, is that he hurt himself doing something idiotic. But like I said, I will resist from making assumptions.
Sullivan asks, do you really have to resort to this kind of nastiness to make a point? Maybe you do. Maybe all's lost in the world of empathy and being courteous to others before you make drastic conclusions about their life. But I do know one thing is that after all's said and done--Cole does look like an idiot for making those assumptions about Sullivan. So next time maybe, just maybe, he'll open the book before judging it by it's cover.
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