TheSV is on the Fence

A friend of mine has just restarted writing. I'm very excited about this as that is how we first met... through an online writing group. But she had some hellish RL stuff happen and she stopped. You can only push a person so far when it comes to writing and she just wasn't there so I let her be. Well, she's coming back. So she created a blog and the first thing she posted was a commentary on a political piece she read and identified with. It was about what a conservative is and has tons of statements of things that conservatives believe.

After she posted it, she made the comment to me that she knows how I feel about politics so she didn't know if I would agree or not. I asked her what she meant by that. I wondered if she thought that I had such strong opinions about this stuff that I would be incapable of discussing it with her. Or did she mean that she had no idea whether I would agree with the article or disagree with it? So I asked her what she meant and she said that I either don't have or don't express my views on politics so she didn't know what my reaction to her post would be.

And she's right. I don't talk politics with people. Or religion. Or controversial topics. To some people, I won't even share opinions on books and movies. It's not really that I don't have opinions on those things. Mostly I do know what I like and don't like, do and don't approve of, and do and don't believe. But there is no way in hell that I am going to open myself up to judgements and criticisms and attacks on my beliefs just because they aren't the same as the person I am talking with.

And so I try to know enough about each thing that I can appear to believe the same thing as the speaker without actually saying that I agree or disagree. I can carry on conversations with die-hard democrats as easily as die-hard republicans. I can have an intelligent discussion with anyone from Baptists to Catholics to Jews to Pagans to Wiccans and everything in between. (Not sure I could pull off Muslim, though. Not because I am against it or anything but just because I don't know much about it. I should put that on my To Do List of things to learn...)

The point is, I sit on the fence for almost everything. Or at the very least, I give that impression to everyone. There are VERY few things I will actually make a public statement for or against and even then only in certain company. I like to think that a huge part of it is that I don't judge others for their beliefs. But I think more of it is that I am a chicken to the core...

(BTW - down at the bottom of my page is one of the few things I've publicly come off the fence about....)