I think it’s easy to forget that we are all learning how to learn here. And how to participate in an exchange where there are feelings, fealties, and contentions far beyond those that emerge in the superficial language. My proposal, however, or at least the way I am reading all of this is people learning. How to see. Communicate. Think. This online social media thing is a battlefield of extremely dangerous experiments. We are not yet sufficiently sophisticated in our relationships with language and perspective… and ideas… to be able to speak authoritatively, and who, in fact, among us feels entitled to such authority?

I remember that I am learning, in ‘enemy terrain’, about the possibilities of communicating in ways that are inclined toward mutual benefit; intuitively and consciously. I am still learning. I presume others are also learning. For when we collapse into courts of opinion and the sorts of behavior that we have a right to tell others how to think or see, then what might have been learning in relation becomes a witch hunt. An inquisition. This path yields grim fruit.

I think it’s too easy to forget what happens when human psyches and agendas condense specific interpretations from a text or exchange… or demand that others should. This is an uncommon and bizarre pathology of our modernity. Text never tells us what it says. And we should be able to read it 12 ways, not one… but if we do select one, it had better not be that one most suited to the prosecution of grievances, else all is lost.