Glimmers of Hope: A Student Opinion About Opinions

More of this, please.  I boldfaced my favorite part:

Bit concerned about the people saying they don’t want anyone who supports Romney to be in the Nerdfighting or Harry Potter community. That’s not really how it works. Shutting people out of communities, for one, implies that the way you think is the only thing that matters, which isn’t really a community if you think about it. I understand why people are reacting in that way because I used to feel a lot like that, especially in secondary school when I was very left-wing and almost all of my friends supported the tories (who are to the left of the Democratic party in the USA, really, but at the time I just thought it was outrageous and unacceptable) and sometimes I wondered whether it wasn’t worth just walking away from those friendships with those people because I didn’t understand why they thought the things that to me seemed so unfair and objectively wrong. I tried to listen but every justification seemed flawed to me. Disagreement, however, isn’t enough of a reason to break down a community into people who agree about everything, or even just people who agree about everything politics. It’s reason to keep talking. Keep talking in a way that is larger than simply a back and forth conversation with an individual who thinks in a different way than you do, keep the larger conversation going by sharing articles and ideas with anyone who follows you and anyone you follow and above all, value good discourse. How are we going to get anywhere as a community (both smaller scale i.e. HP or NF and larger scale i.e. country/planet) if we only surround ourselves with people we agree with and don’t listen to anything else? By all means challenge it, but in order to challenge it properly, you have to listen first and the communities have to exist in which that kind of communication can be possible.