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Original Message -----
Sent: May 26, 2005 14:42
Subject: farewell to TT -- long but most real answer
Lance, this may be too long to post
on TT. I'll let you be the judge. I'm writing as if to you--you asked
the question, and besides, that keeps me more open and thinking less
about how others will respond. Do what you like with it.
Why did I leave? David is partly
right about the time factor, but that springs from the more important
issue, which is the quality of communication that happens on TT; I am
serious about communication (maybe too serious!), so I put a lot of
time and thought and energy into reading the messages and composing
readable replies. As it became harder and harder to understand and be
understood, that investment only increased, and with it my anxiety
about the result, since it usually turned out badly. It just
wasn't worth it. Reducing the number of messages would only get at the
symptom, not the cause.
When I started on TT the first time,
back in December or January or whenever it was, I took everybody at
face value and expected and practised normal communication. I
actually learned stuff from some people, got new ideas from them. It wasn't long, though, till it became clear to
me that some key participants were not up for learning anything at all.
They were, at best, only into correcting people. At their worst, they
did not read posts lovingly (putting things in the best light, trusting
the intent, looking for points of commonality). They also did not read
them properly (as wholes, following the thread of argument, looking for
the main thrust, interpreting parts in the light of the whole). Instead
they tended to pick messages to bits and "pounce" on individual
words or predicates that raised flags for them. This was generally done
in a tone of superior spirituality, superior allegiance to God and
Scripture. There was never any good way to respond to this. What can
you say in return when someone does this, since every subsequent
attempt to address their response only leads to more of the same? Here
was something I can only describe as deafness, hardness. With other
people outside TT--for example, you and I when we misunderstand each
other--we try again. There is good will. It gets cleared up. Or we find
the places where we agree and go on from there. But on TT, people just
dug in deeper and deeper. Ironically, people ended up going to
ridiculous extremes of untenability to defend something they had said.
The same old arguments kept coming
up again and again, with zero change in anybody's position. That was a
bore. We were in an argumentative rut, so that if somebody posted
something that wasn't related to one of the polarizing issues, it
was ignored, or quickly and superficially dispatched, or twisted into
something that did relate to one of the polarizing issues. Meanwhile on
the polarizing issues there was just mindless mouthing going on, for
the most part. If Camp A Member said something, it had to be right. If
Camp B Member said something, it had to be wrong. There were only rare
exceptions to this.
There was a lot of sarcasm. From
childhood I have been unable to tolerate sarcasm. Sarcasm when it is
obvious you are joking is one thing (even though it's a weak form of
humour), but then there's sarcasm intended to make the other
person appear absurd or evil so you can beat them unfairly. It is not
real communication and I do not allow it in my family. For me it is the
end of the conversation, which is why I stopped responding to certain
TT people altogether.
Accusation, recrimination, smearing,
insulting, and condemning were common too, and produced anger in me,
not all of it righteous. This anger generally turned to sorrow. I would
seek refreshment elsewhere (in prayer--sometimes confessing and
receiving forgiveness for my anger--in Scripture, in other parts of the
Christian community, etc.), and try again, but this cycle got to be
wearing, and the people doing these things seemed not to notice or care
that they were. It was discouraging. When I left the first time it was
with the idea of probably returning refreshed at some point, and I did.
That might still happen this time, too, but if it does it will take
longer. I think I have to grow more, be wiser and stronger and
braver, before I can be of use on TT as it is.
Even those who didn't deal in this
kind of thing were mostly not prepared to entertain any idea they
didn't already believe. The whole point of the exercise seemed to be to
prove you were right, rather than simply to be understood and to
understand and consider and appreciate. (I can just hear it: "How can I
appreciate what is patently false? And if it's false don't I have a
moral obligation to say so, every time?") Some, when they didn't understand something, just shrugged
and said, "Who cares? I know what I think. If I don't understand it, it
must be something that doesn't matter, or worse, something pretentious.
Obviously God doesn't want me to be bothered with these things." I
don't think calm closed-mindedness is any better than ranting
closed-mindedness.
When I engaged several people off
list, I found them to be quite different. That, I think, might have
been the final stroke, because I realized that these were probably all
decent, warm, pleasant, humble people but the dynamic of TT was
twisting them into something else, and that seemed downright sinister
to me. I suspected it might be happening to me as well. And if the
people engaging on TT weren't the real ones, why bother at all?
Debbie
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