Dear wikiloops members,
as you hopefully know, wikiloops is not the place to take out your personal political views.
I am going to stick to these rules and keep my personal political opinion to myself.
That is not all easy, since I do have an opinion and strong feelings about that, and could go on at lengths, but this post is about the wikiloops community.
What all of us have in common
Well, I guess pretty much all of us have been observing the US election process in the past weeks.
And all of us have our opinions on how that went or is still going.
About 40% of the wikiloops community lives on US territory, the other 60% (including me) have watched from outside of the US. [source: wikiloops statistics]
What we have in common is that all of us are drawing our information from news sources which we personally trust.
Now, I have best reasons to trust my news sources of choice, and so do you, that is OK.
Should we find out your news report something else than mine, then we better find a way to shrug and say "oh well, time will tell which source was right", if the only other option is starting an argument that will never end.
Where we are different
What I would like to bring to your attention today is this - and I do believe that this is not disputed by anyone:
The election divided the voters in two big groups, so no matter who wins or won, both parties and their supporters are not small portions of the USAs citizens.
I have no reliable information on how the outside-of-US humans are divided if they were asked, and my personal opinion is of no interest here, so let's just leave that open for now.
With just the US citizens in mind and looking at the wikiloops community, we need to face the fact that out of 40% of the wikiloops users (our US-based users),
about half are in a festive mood and believe their pary won,
and about half are everything but happy and believe either the final result is yet to be found, or that the final result is not what they had wished for.
It seems to be a natural thing that people like to celebrate a winner, and that such celebrations are not the moments where one thinks about the bad day the non-winners are having.
If people celebrate their sports team winning some cup, they don't feel sorry about the losings teams fans.
To stick with the sports comparison - Usually, the winning teams supporters do not celebrate together with the loosing teams followers, and usually there is no discussion about whether the game is still on or whether it is over.
The situation we are in on wikiloops
Quite a lot of wikiloops people feel like bursting into celebration, while quite a lot of wikiloops people are not even convinced the game is over.
If you were the owner of a pub hosting this party of completely different moods & views - how would you feel, and what would you do?
Try to hush the cheers of the celebrating crowd to make sure the other party wont get angry, or would you tell a good part of your visitors to get out and leave the house, so the celebrating party can go on undisturbed?
Neither option seems a good one to me, but if our virtual pub wikiloops gets wrecked in a useless fight over something we are not going to solve on wikiloops, then what good have we done to anyone?
What I am asking for
The only option left is to address the community and ask for everyones awareness and willingness to avoid unnecessary provocation, and here I sit doing just that.
If we want to survive situations like this one as one community of very different individuals,
then it is time to show our support for the diversity of wikiloops right now, instead of dividing about a very non-musical thing.
It does require tolerance and biting ones tongue from all of us, and that is not easy, but I hope you agree wikiloops is worth the effort.
My sincere thanks go out to all of you who have avoided bringing controversy to wikiloops during these times of heated debate.
If one looks at how internet users interact on most platforms these days, then the tone of interaction is a harsh one.
I am thankful that we have seen fairly little of that on wikiloops.com, let's keep that up so we all can enjoy making music here.
Thank you for your attention and now back to music :)
p.s.
I have deliberately locked this thread so we wont start any politics discussions here. Feel free to send me thoughts by PM if you like.
as you hopefully know, wikiloops is not the place to take out your personal political views.
I am going to stick to these rules and keep my personal political opinion to myself.
That is not all easy, since I do have an opinion and strong feelings about that, and could go on at lengths, but this post is about the wikiloops community.
What all of us have in common
Well, I guess pretty much all of us have been observing the US election process in the past weeks.
And all of us have our opinions on how that went or is still going.
About 40% of the wikiloops community lives on US territory, the other 60% (including me) have watched from outside of the US. [source: wikiloops statistics]
What we have in common is that all of us are drawing our information from news sources which we personally trust.
Now, I have best reasons to trust my news sources of choice, and so do you, that is OK.
Should we find out your news report something else than mine, then we better find a way to shrug and say "oh well, time will tell which source was right", if the only other option is starting an argument that will never end.
Where we are different
What I would like to bring to your attention today is this - and I do believe that this is not disputed by anyone:
The election divided the voters in two big groups, so no matter who wins or won, both parties and their supporters are not small portions of the USAs citizens.
I have no reliable information on how the outside-of-US humans are divided if they were asked, and my personal opinion is of no interest here, so let's just leave that open for now.
With just the US citizens in mind and looking at the wikiloops community, we need to face the fact that out of 40% of the wikiloops users (our US-based users),
about half are in a festive mood and believe their pary won,
and about half are everything but happy and believe either the final result is yet to be found, or that the final result is not what they had wished for.
It seems to be a natural thing that people like to celebrate a winner, and that such celebrations are not the moments where one thinks about the bad day the non-winners are having.
If people celebrate their sports team winning some cup, they don't feel sorry about the losings teams fans.
To stick with the sports comparison - Usually, the winning teams supporters do not celebrate together with the loosing teams followers, and usually there is no discussion about whether the game is still on or whether it is over.
The situation we are in on wikiloops
Quite a lot of wikiloops people feel like bursting into celebration, while quite a lot of wikiloops people are not even convinced the game is over.
If you were the owner of a pub hosting this party of completely different moods & views - how would you feel, and what would you do?
Try to hush the cheers of the celebrating crowd to make sure the other party wont get angry, or would you tell a good part of your visitors to get out and leave the house, so the celebrating party can go on undisturbed?
Neither option seems a good one to me, but if our virtual pub wikiloops gets wrecked in a useless fight over something we are not going to solve on wikiloops, then what good have we done to anyone?
What I am asking for
The only option left is to address the community and ask for everyones awareness and willingness to avoid unnecessary provocation, and here I sit doing just that.
If we want to survive situations like this one as one community of very different individuals,
then it is time to show our support for the diversity of wikiloops right now, instead of dividing about a very non-musical thing.
It does require tolerance and biting ones tongue from all of us, and that is not easy, but I hope you agree wikiloops is worth the effort.
My sincere thanks go out to all of you who have avoided bringing controversy to wikiloops during these times of heated debate.
If one looks at how internet users interact on most platforms these days, then the tone of interaction is a harsh one.
I am thankful that we have seen fairly little of that on wikiloops.com, let's keep that up so we all can enjoy making music here.
Thank you for your attention and now back to music :)
p.s.
I have deliberately locked this thread so we wont start any politics discussions here. Feel free to send me thoughts by PM if you like.
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