Drama

Reading through the early part of this thread reminds me that things used to be worse, so when we're tempted to believe that things are falling apart here and that things used to be so much nicer, remember this.

Moving on to something much lighter than was dealt with earlier in this thread, please keep in mind that we have many forums and sub-forums here so that we can include something for almost everyone. Pretty much anyone should be able to find something of interest here. By the same token, no one is likely to be interested in everything here so if you see someone discussing a topic that you're not interested in, or that you don't like for some reason, there's no reason to complain about it unless it's overly offensive. Rather than trying to make everyone else stop talking about something that you don't want to read about, simply move on to something that you do want to talk or read about.

I don't drink but I don't feel the need to campaign to make the town close the couple of bars that we have in town, and I'm not Catholic, but there is a Catholic Church a few blocks from my house and it hasn't done anything to me that I'm aware of. For that matter, we even had a Wiccan coffee house here at one time and, while I did joke about that one a bit, it closed before long without any help from me.

Face it, we're all over fifty. We've already lost a few people to death, and probably others that we haven't heard about. We're sure to lose others, so can't we just try to make the time that we have left a little more interesting, fun, educational, or even challenging, without the enmity? Some of us may be quirky, but there's nothing wrong with that. Many of the people I remember best from my life have been quirky. Some of us might feel the need to always be right and, while that might be annoying, I don't know that it's overly annoying, and then there are those of us, like me, who are indeed always right...

You get the idea, I hope. There are a lot of personalities here and some of them are going to clash. If Yvonne and I were to try to jump in immediately to stop the first hint of disagreement, things would soon get pretty boring around here. From time to time, someone is going to say the wrong thing in anger, and I get that. If you can work it out for yourselves, or if you can realize it when you've gone too far, and apologize - not to me but to the person you offended - then the results can be better than if the disagreement had never occurred in the first place.

You don't have to agree with everyone here, and I wouldn't want you to, but when you disagree, address your disagreement to the issue and not to the person. That's the difference between a debate and a personal attack, and anyone who is uncomfortable with debate can easily find other topics more to their liking here.

Okay, I'm done.