Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Great Article...

With my busy schedule I get most of my news from skimming headlines online from the most unbiased news I can find...the Christian Science Monitor. I was very skeptical at first when it was recommended to me (due to the name), but it has proven itself time and time again. I feel that they do a good job of balancing polarized topics (as far as what and how many articles to publish) and I particularly enjoy looking over their OpEd articles that they post online. It is a refreshing change of pace from Fox News (conservative) and everything else (liberal).

Yesterday I found this one and thought that it did a good job of reporting on a topic that is well known to most of us. The highlight of the article was the reactions from the faculty to the author's published article:
As we hammered away at the issue, one of his colleagues with whom he shared an office grew visibly agitated. Then, while I was in mid-sentence, she exploded.

"You think you're so [expletive] cute with your little column," she told me. "I read your piece and all you want is attention. You're just like Bill O'Reilly. You just want to get up on your [expletive] soapbox and have people look at you."

From the disgust with which she attacked me, you would have thought I had advocated Nazism. She quickly grew so emotional that she had to leave the room. But before she departed, she stood over me and screamed.

The above passage made me think of a conversation I recently had with a friend where they attempted to argue with the National Park Service on an issue. My friend said that they were employing reason to look for an explanation for a new regulation that was instated. The NPS representative became defensive, emotional, and began to walk out of the town hall style meeting. The other attendees of the meeting calmed her down and brought her back but that was essentially the end of the discussion. An interesting defense mechanism when ridiculous is cornered by reason but the scary part is that IT WORKED. The issue was dropped. Grrr.

---TK

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