You just can't win

I read a lot of blogs. A LOT of blogs.

Mostly personal blogs, but I read a host of others too. In fact, my feed reader contains a bunch of different folders. Daily reads (that is most of you out there), Sports blogs, Beer blogs, Film blogs, Political blogs and New stuff. That last one includes every new blogger who comments here. I read/browse them for a while and then I either delete them or they graduate to my Daily reads. So work it people!

It's amazing to me how often topics intersect within these semi-rigid guidelines. Some personal bloggers will talk about films and some film bloggers will talk about their personal lives. Same thing goes for beer, sports and politics. They all seem to cross over. Especially politics. These days, especially.

Anyone reading these words right now who have been here before probably know that I lean to the left on the political spectrum. I try to show as much respect as possible to the other side, because aren't there enough things in this world that separate us already? My political views certainly aren't important enough contribute to that kind of divisiveness.

But it happens. It happens to just about everyone. You take an easy shot at the other side or post a silly political cartoon, and someone is gonna get offended. It would almost be too exhausting to censor yourself to the point that you don't offend someone. Somebody, somewhere is gonna get offended. I've had some bloggy experience with this and a few of you out there know what I'm talking about. It's just silly, and frankly it's not worth anyone's time.

There's a baseball blog that I read from a sports writer in Kansas City. His name is Joe Posnanski and he is a baseball and film geek just like me. I found his site because I like reading sports writers from different cities. Gives a different perspective from what we in NY usually read about on a daily basis.

So he went off-topic the other day and wrote a post about the election our great nation just went through on Tuesday. And he focused on the history of the night rather than the politics of the individuals engaged in the campaigns. Being a sports writer, of course, it was inevitable that he brought Jackie Robinson. I thought it was a tidy and decidedly non-political post about the evening. It was a post about hope, and it was very well done. It wasn't nasty, divisive or filled with idiotic rhetoric.

Of course that didn't stop the crazies from coming out in the comment section. Hate, prejudice and Godwin's Law eventually broke out.

On a baseball site.

In a post about hope.

It was some comments about that last topic that led Joe to close the comments on that post and delete a few comments that were particularly hateful. He mentioned it briefly on his next post and tried to move gracefully back to baseball. The first comment on that second post, of course, blamed Posnanski himself for having the gall to write a post about how he felt about the election. How he felt about history. How he felt about hope.

You just can't win.