Please, Steve, I Beg of You

Steve,

Let's agree to disagree.  I don't share your views of much, and you don't share mine.  I don't know you well enough to know if I would personally like you, and it's a reasonable bet you wouldn't personally like me.  No problem.  You can't be friends with everyone.

This morning, you and I happened to be interacting with our neighbors, who were in a long line waiting to vote.  We were talking to them about the same thing: whether or not to move the BP election.  I think we should, and I have my reasons.  You think we shouldn't, and you have yours.  Again, no problem.

The fact is, this difference of opinion could have made a nice discussion.  We could have worked together to try to convince them, each of our own view.  Interesting.  Maybe fun.

But Steve, the fact is that you don't personally know most of the people on line, and neither do I.  So if you disagree with what I'm saying, say you disagree.  Don't stand in front of all these people, these strangers, and say to me "You lie, we already know that."

This seems to be a favored tactic of yours.  You unleashed it a year or two ago in your angry rant about me in the Biscayne Times, and you tell it to our neighbors.

Really, Steve?  Is this how you behave?  You deal with people who don't agree with you by calling them liars, and you announce this to the world?  Don't you think this is unseemly?  Don't you think it says more about you, who openly behave this way, than it does about me, whose positions, with which you don't agree and which you believe not to be true, are unknown to these people?  They don't know if I'm a liar, but they can see you're ill-tempered and reduced to calling people names.

I offered an open debate.  Barbara Watts tried to broker it.  You weren't interested.  If you think you have something to say, I don't know why you wouldn't have wanted to say it, in the open.  But that's OK.  Frankly, I wouldn't want to have to defend your positions, either.  But don't act like an angry child, calling people names, and in public.  Grow up, Steve.

Fred