Is America being eaten up with hatred?

Question

Does this board represent a cross section of the good folk of America? I could just be reading the wrong questions, but it seems there is an awful lot of hatred out there, mexicans, blacks, iraqis, iranians, muslims in general, anyone not white, the french, gays, hippies, liberals, the list goes on.

It's a little worrying, have we brits affiliated ourselves with a country of bigots?

No bentspoon, I did not. I was careful not to suggest that all american posters were the same. I try to avoid generalisatoins wherever possible. I asked what I believe is a fair question, I am genuinely interested in the responses.

Answer 1

Read some books by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn to cleanse your mind of the elite's polluted version of historical, social and political issues. Educate yourself and your children beyond the warped world perspective portrayed by the media and our public education system. Participate in your child's education by teaching them to think critically and dig far beneath the surface. Live within your means and avoid credit card debt like the plague. Demand and support justice for the oppressed; peace will follow justice. Donate your time and money to truly compassionate and humane causes (as much and as often as you are able). Take personal responsibility and act as honestly as humanly possible in your affairs. Through non-violent action, press for social justice, human rights, dignity and peace.

Answer 2

I have to agree with "Ice Sabe". A lot of people like to vent here, and many think this is the place make absurd statement and ignorant comment for the sake of getting a response. However, there is a silent majority. Many who probably just don't bother with the insanity you read in this forum. In an odd sort of way, you can almost find the stupidity kind of humorous.

Keep the faith, no matter what region, there is a silent majority that has common sense and are not angered by every political subject, or the people that run the government. We may not be really loud on paper but do know the difference between right and wrong, and why things happen the way they do.

Answer 3

Amazing what a little anonimity can do to bring out individuals hatred of everyone else. The problem I think is that Americans, and maybe a number of other nationalities as well, are insecure. There is no solid definition of what an American is or what that means. To most Americans, as it seems, anyone who is different from ourselves is a threat; and since our country is a melting pot of every nation and culture, we get confused and frightend easily. There are very few (again, as it seems) with courage or intelligence here. We like to hide ourselves in the familiar and mundane and any change from that is considered dangerous and revolutionary.

We may be a country of bigots, but more likely, we're just sheep. Too stupid and afraid to actually look and yet not see a pack of wolves surrounding and innudating us.

Answer 4

Yes...and what's worse, we can't even have a civil disagreement about issues without going off on some hate-filled tirade.

We've become a nation of black or white issues without considering that there may be some shades of gray that actually make sense.
No one is wrong or right 100% of the time, but we've stopped being tolerate of others because WE ARE ALWAYS RIGHT.

Or so some of us would like to believe.

Time to tone down our self-righteous attitudes, shut our mouths for a while and listen.
We might even come to learn that someone else has a better idea!

Answer 5

Where DO you think we learned such behavior? Just kidding.

No internet board anywhere is going to be a reliable cross-section of any society, because of it's anonymous nature. We call them Trolls, and they know no specific nationality, race, religion, or gender. When people believe they can speak without repercussions, they'll say anything that comes to mind; just to get a rise.

Answer 6

the gays hippies, blacks et al are part of this country too. There is hatred on both sides.

You yourself make a bigoted statement about americans. We all need to open our eyes and see ourselves. The cycle goes on and you have a torch in your hand.

Gays and hippies have hate too.

Answer 7

Your answer is YES. The problem, is that Everyone thinks that THEIR race, or group, or orentation, is what counts. Our country is on a path to be destroyed from within due to the influx of immagrants that wish to change America to more what their homeland is. Instead of trying that, if they wished to live here, then they need to become American, not African American, Asian American, etc. But AMERICAN. You cannot have loyalties to another country and be a part of another.

Answer 8

They seem to busy deluding themselves about the American Dream, that it is the people who are wrong and not the dream itself. It is like the last days of communism - only in reverse.

Answer 9

The government want hatred, the more we hate other people, the less time to hate the for the sorry job they are doing. Politicion are getting rich off taxpayers expense.

Answer 10

"Is America being eaten up with hatred? "

It's possible, though I think *Greed*, or more specifically, people not holding others accountable for their out-of-control greed, is the real issue. People will stop being so stressed out in general when they see that their jobs, lives and *futures* aren't being thrown away to the lowest possible bidders living in nations with no labor laws, environmental standards *or* political freedoms (a.k.a. human rights).

"Does this board represent a cross section of the good folk of America?"

This is the real question, to which I'd have to answer, Hell NO!

The Internet in general, and Yahoo in particular, has a notorious habit of protecting *trolls*, that is people who are *only* here to insult and cause offense, at the expense of legitimate users who abide by the rules the *overwhelming* majority of the time. I think this is just a leftover of the old "hacker" culture, or the notion that freedom of speech and information, of *any* sort no matter how offensive, is to be protected more than *anything else*. The folks in charge of Yahoo *empathize* more with the trolls who demonstrate some skills in *abusing the system* than they do with the ordinary users who aren't even *aware* that there *is* a system. Yahoo Inc. thinks hanging with the trolls and being "like them" makes them cool or something....who knows?

Point is there are a LOT of good folks still here in America, of *all* races and ethnicities, and of *all manner* of political persuasions....but you won't see as much of *us* here on the internet because one of the things trolls *do* is, they not only post offensive and distracting crap....they post it by the *truckload* repeating their nonsense and drivel *everyday*, dozens of times a day. It's an attack by volume, an attempt to shout down other folks by way of literally flooding pages and flinging their *monkey dung* until something sticks.

And the only real way to stop it is to stoop to their level, find a profile of someone you hate, and just *carpet bomb* it, reporting *everything* on the profile, *ALL* Questions (twice! click on the link *and* the Flag), and *ALL* Answers. Yes, this can take hours to do and is really tedious.....but it will get a profile suspended in short order, and also *teach you* what the troll's typical syntax *looks like* so you can do this *again* repeatedly for his next two or three new profiles.

But yes, there are still good people here in America, you just aren't seeing or hearing as much of us, because a) we stick to the rules here, and b) the trolls do not, and in the process *dominate* the discourse, much as they did on the late Yahoo News Message Boards (which got deleted over this crap...it was bad, trust me).

"It's a little worrying, have we brits affiliated ourselves with a country of bigots?"

Setting aside the mildly troll-ish nature of this question, which really is a dime a dozen around here.....I don't think we're a nation of bigots so much.

But I do think we've had 26+ YEARS of the CEO-owned Mass Media leading folks astray and pumping their heads full of lies and garbage and so yeah....I do think we have really been *misled* and as a result we have unwittingly put the Bigots in Charge, all in the name of not wanting to be "a wuss" or "politically correct". We've let the Rich Old Men, and the Bigots they own, ruin the government, ruin healthcare, ruin public schools, just about everything. Whole cities (Detroit, New Orleans) have gone into the kinds of rot and ruin you'd normally only see in the farthest and most isolated of depressed "pocket economies" like what's out in Appalachia.

And a lot of the non-troll hating, that reaction you are seeing from legitimate Yahoo users here, is coming from ordinary people *reacting* to years of a Stockholm Syndrome type of dysfunction, wherein people are *more* concerned with Paris Hilton's going to jail, not even for two whole *months*, than they are with the ongoing butchery in Iraq, or with the ongoing decay of our ecosystem, or with New Orleans still being in rot and ruin over a *year and a half* after the damn hurricane!

It's people freaking out over the fact that our priorities have become *that* twisted, that _American Idol_ garners more passion from people than school shootings do. Just based on how many *days* here people went *on and on and ON and on* about this "Sanjaya" person, versus Cho at Virginia Tech.

The good news is, yeah, at least some folks *ARE* freaking out and re-discovering that they have a *brain* and a *heart*.

The bad news is, yes, people are going to be ranty and psycho for a good long while....26+ years of Mass Media brainwashing doesn't go away overnight because it wasn't *put there* overnight.

But at least there *are* signs of life and intelligence here. ^_^ It could all be worse.

Thank you for your time and patience....sorry to go on so, but I do hope this was helpful. ^_^