The importance of community

[Nine_Ender]

This evening I attended the holiday party of our neighborhood club. I live in a community near RTP in North Carolina which includes a mix of people from all over the country and world.

At our table of ten there was a Muslim couple (he is a pharma research PhD), Jewish couple (both are accountants), a couple from India (Hindu & he works doing software development, two ladies who co-reside (you get what I mean), and my wife & myself.

I had a very excellent evening. Everyone got along. Of course I knew most of these people before this evening. We arrived first and they all decided to sit with us.

The "white elephant" gift exchange was fun and amusing -- after the dinner and desert. Wine and beer was freely flowing (for those who drink).

My point is -- if we can all get along then why can't others do the same. We all come from different backgrounds, have different political opinions, and different cultural customs... but yet we have an excellent time together for the evening.

We are a community -- despite our differences. We are open about our differences, yet still tolerant of one another -- while being civil in our discourse, even during disagreements.

Why can't people on ET do the same?

We are after all a community in the ET Politics forum -- hopefully we can make a commitment to be more civil to one another in the upcoming year - despite our differences and disagreements.

Just my two cents for the Holiday season... (after three glasses of Malbec this evening).

I encounter diversity all the time in Toronto, so much so that it's more common then not. So while I was growing up in an almost all WASP town I may have reacted as you have to your get together ( and there is nothing wrong with it ), the fact you are identifying everyone the way you do suggests you are too focused on the differences in how you think of other people. I suspect given time the US will embrace diversity to a greater level and people will just be people with ideas and feelings and it will be less about republicans/democrats, white/black, christian/muslim, patriot/immigrant, conservative/liberal or any other split where Americans seek to differentiate among each other.

Now don't go off the handle on this again. There is no malice in my post, it's just an observation and I can relate because of transitions in my own life where environment was the main factor.

 

[TreeFrogTrader]

I encounter diversity all the time in Toronto, so much so that it's more common then not. So while I was growing up in an almost all WASP town I may have reacted as you have to your get together ( and there is nothing wrong with it ), the fact you are identifying everyone the way you do suggests you are too focused on the differences in how you think of other people. I suspect given time the US will embrace diversity to a greater level and people will just be people with ideas and feelings and it will be less about republicans/democrats, white/black, christian/muslim, patriot/immigrant, conservative/liberal or any other split where Americans seek to differentiate among each other.

Now don't go off the handle on this again. There is no malice in my post, it's just an observation and I can relate because of transitions in my own life where environment was the main factor.

Oh pooh. The entire population of Canada is less than California and you are geographically isolated from any unstable countries thanks to the Arctic Ocean and the United States. If you had mexico on your southern border you would be talking about lynching your Boy Scout Prime Minister right now if he was still singing kumbaya about illegals. And there is no country on earth that has taken more immigrants than America so skip the diversity lectures.