Back Again From Linville Gorge

Like the title says. Man, that place is awesome. There's a moderately amusing story about this trip that I might regale you with at some point, but not now.

Maybe it's different for people who grew up in town, or maybe just for those whose sensibilities are different than mine, but I find that when I'm around lots of people for too long, or I get insufficient exposure to nature I get kind of crazy.

Anyway, I'm also resolving to spend less time obsessing over politics. The return on investment is just too small.

I was, though, trying to do the cognitive Gestalt shift thing re: the candidates I don't favor. It's a little hard for me to do that re: HRC right now, but I found that I could do it pretty well for McCain. That might be an illusion, or it might be because I'm really not a very good liberal, I dunno. Though on that last point: I'm really not. I don't have any strong commitment to national health care, for example. Or it may be because I really am a true liberal in that I'm too open-minded (read: wishy-washy) to take my own side in an argument.

Anyway, I tried doing the Gestalt-shift thing on Obama, too, with a bit of success.

Though in the end, it's hard for me to let go of the one point that seems clearly true to me: very much of the mess we're in we're in because we (or, rather, some of us) have made politics nastier than it needs to be. And that, of course, is Obama's point. This is a point I've been pushing ever since I started this blog: it's very tempting and very easy to make disagreements of this kind nasty; and once that happens, it's very hard to be objective and reasonable, and very, very hard to go back. We can keep muddling through in this crazy way, allowing politics to get nasty every time and hoping that a tiny bit of rationality will make it through, or we can take a firm stand now and make making our political discourse more civil and reasonable one of our main goals. One thing I'm fairly certain of is that the latter course of action is the better one.

To semi-hemi-demi-paraphrase Peirce: t's funny how everybody can agree that every election cycle we choose one candidate who's fine and one who's a monster...it's just that we can't agree on which is which...