Regular visitors to this website have by now gotten used to the endless, 24/7 debate over the school merger situation. Back and forth it goes, day after day, like an eternal game of badminton between six or seven players. Nobody’s really watching the game any more and no one cares about it except the players, but occasionally, things get a little testy and one or more of the combatants steps over the perceived line and the squawking to the referee begins; “Ban him. Ban him.”
This weekend was one such situation. A couple of people complained about an OTP post on the site, and I got one email demanding that I deal with the situation. Pulling myself away from my, you know, life, I looked at the posts in question and decided to take them down, though to me they didn’t seem much different than numerous other insults that have gone back and forth over the past six weeks. But whatever.
Hard as it is to believe, monitoring this silly debate 24/7 is low on my list of weekend activities. You folks have made the choice to engage each other, to argue back and forth every day, to believe somehow that you can change each others viewpoints if you just argue long and hard enough. You may also believe in the tooth fairy, I dunno. I mean, you could ignore each other. You could comment on other subjects. You could take a break for a day or two. It’s up to you. If debating on a website brings you angst, there is a solution.
But listen, guys, if I banned people from this site on the basis of reader emails and complaints, you’d all be gone. I won’t do that, because there’s plenty of room on the website for all kinds of folks, including the half-dozen of you who enjoy debating the school mergers day after day. And I will continue to monitor for posts that are personal attacks, overtly racist, vulgar, etc. and remove them. But I ain’t going to referee this silly squabble. I have better things to do. And if you didn’t enjoy arguing with each other, you wouldn’t do it day after day, right?
