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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (43952)	5/12/2004 5:25:46 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793705

and are more visible to LB than to you because his own position is further away from theirs than yours is. I take your point but I don't think that's the primary factor. I am a trained and experienced facilitator and mediator. I am accustomed to looking at differences with an eye toward getting past the sharp edges and bringing people together. This is something I fell into late in life and I am still amazed at what can be done if people are willing. They are never as far apart as they think they are, Israelis and Palestinians excepted, of course. Partisans work in the opposite direction, making the gap wider and deeper and harder, a fight to the death. Each of us has a choice in how we deal with differences. We can see differences as color and texture and even as a source of strength or we can see them as an obstacle. And if we find they are obstacles, we can either light a candle or curse the darkness. I have never argued that there is no bias but rather the extent of it. What I have argued against is the sharp edges, the predisposition to see bias in everything, the hostility that ensues, and what seems to be a preference for that darkness, a reassuring co-dependent comfort in it. I have to take breaks from this place periodically because it's so hard to look at that darkness day after day. Here's a very small example. I hope the author doesn't mind but I had this post on my clipboard because I considered responding to it this morning but decided against it given the distress currently permeating the thread. <<What gets me is that 60 minutes II is going to rerun the prison pictures this week but you know damn well they won't show the Berg Video. That wouldn't help the "anti-war" movement.>> See, to me that's dark--assuming that one's worst scenario will come to pass, taking as a given the worst possible motive when there are alternative neutral or benign explanations, and then getting exercised over it as though it were so. I'll get off my soapbox now. Since you used LB to illustrate your point, and I hope he doesn't mind, he and I aren't really sufficiently different in our preferences regarding how the government should work, I don't think, to explain our differing interpretations of bias. He and I differ on Iraq. He has a party affiliation and I don't. No other essential differences come to mind. What is different is that he's looking for differences and I'm looking for commonality. IMO, of course.