Politics has become entirely too negative—even for me. A little humour can help lighten it all up, but with caution: Mockery can become every bit as bad as no humour at all.
A month ago, I mentioned my blogging dilemma in which, “It’s not that I don’t have things I want to say, it’s that I have things I don’t want to publish.” I talked about the basic reasons, but there’s one I only hinted at: My mockery was out of control.
The fact is, my contempt for some of my political adversaries is so deep that sometimes I found myself being pretty brutal when I meant to lighten things up, and that’s exactly the sort of negativity I wanted to get away from. The better solution, it seemed to me, was to say nothing at all.
Long time readers will remember my Two-day Rule. It’s saved me from many ill-advised posts, always negative, even if sometimes I thought they were funny in their mocking (they weren’t).
Since I wrote the post last month, there was one mocking post in particular that I killed before publishing. It started out kind of funny, but devolved into me saying things that if anyone else said them, I’d think it was offensive. That was kind of jarring. And even though I cut the offending part, I quickly lost interest in the rest and abandoned the post altogether.
So, I think my decision to take a step back was wise, because mockery with bitterness is just negativity with a phony smile. It’s best to mostly avoid that.
Because politics has become entirely too negative, I don’t want to say or do anything that contributes unnecessarily to that negativity (there are, of course, times when it’s unavoidable). Sometimes that means the best thing to do is avoid even attempting any humour. I wish more people realised that.
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