The Critics Respond, Part Sixteen

‘There are none so blind as those who will not see. The most deluded people are those who choose to ignore what they already know’.

As fate would have it, this past week I was part of two fairly stout discussions on abortion. The first one was a personal discussion about the topic. Well, it started out as a general discussion, a time-killer to keep me awake while I was on the long run fron Franklin, TN to Montgomery, AL, but it turned personal very quickly. It wasn't just that we were on opposite sides of the fence; it was that we had made different decisions when faced with not-so-disparate situations. If the mother's life could be at risk, what do you do about the child? I remember the decision that I helped make, it wasn't that long ago:

The person with whom I was having the conversation made the opposite decision. So we have no photo, at least none that wouldn't be too much for even the non-squeamish among my readers.

Anyway, we squabbled about this for the better part of ninety minutes before somebody hung up on somebody, and I was troubled for the rest of the drive. The whole conversation didn't need to happen. Neither one of us was going to convince the other one. All that happened was that she felt I was insulting her morality/character/whatever and I felt she was glossing-over the killing of what I felt to be a real person just like you or me. So I resolved that I wasn't going to have that conversation with her or anyone like her ever, ever again.

Naturally, 48 hours later the same argument pops up on TTAC, with even less reason for it. The original story was about our title-pawn king Steve Lang and one of his less reliable customers. Someone had to bring abortion into it, for reasons that still escape me. At that point, shit got real in a hurry. I was heading back to Columbus by then and hadn't seen the site for more than a few hours, so it fell to my brother to calm everybody down and announce that there'd be no more discussion on the topic. Shortly afterwards, one of our readers and commenters, "Kenmore", posted the above.

Now, keep in mind that we didn't shut the discussion down in a way that favored either side. We just said --- hey, dumbasses, a car forum isn't the best place to make your case for abortion on demand or fetal humanity. Everybody but Kenmore was pretty much okay with that. We didn't go back and censor people, we didn't disappear the discussion, we didn't "move it to #notawesome" or whatever Jalopnik is doing lately to keep people from arguing. We just halted it. Apparently, that was too much for our reader, so he quit. I wonder if he'll stay quit?

The older I get, the less I want to argue polarizing issues or even discuss them. It doesn't seem like anybody ever comes away from those arguments with anything other than a strengthened sense of self-righteousness or victimization. But somehow, somewhere, these arguments must be taking place in a way that actually sways people on one direction or another. Otherwise, how would people who haven't had to make a decision about an abortion have an opinion on abortion? How would people who know literally nothing about how guns operate have an opinion on gun control? Why would people keep writing that the Viper is too difficult to drive?