Newaygo County Public Opinion

The View From Here: We Have Become Dogmatic When We Differ

9/24/2025

Bill and I discussing the fragility of human relationships he so eloquently captured in "The Sound and the Fury"

By Ken DeLaat

Two White-hot stories are infusing local social media with levels of hatred being spewed about so rabidly that one might think they are unprecedented.
Unfortunately, they're not.

We’ve all seen this before when the current political climate, a curious phenomenon that allows any subject to be dragged into a them vs. us battle, seeps into an online conversation when suddenly folks local and faraway, real and disguised, anonymous or robotic, jump in to add their frighteningly short of clever comments.

It is ultimately one of the most depressing aspects of who we are today. A vindictive collection of combatants with both sides claiming the highest moral ground and each falling far far short of achieving it.

There is no moral high ground in this escalating conflict that is devoid of dialogue,
and perhaps no solution. Not when someone has to win and each feels the other has no place in today’s world. It can only grow in its current state and sadly there exists no movement with the muscle to stop it.

“Whereas democracy is founded on the negotiation of diverging viewpoints, ideology is sustained through intolerance of dissent. You are, as the saying has it, either with us or against us. This is the essence of bigotry.”-Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

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Chadwick Walenga

9/24/2025 07:33:25 pm

For what it's worth...

There's something happening here
What it is
Ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me
I got to beware

I saw the headline of the shooting at the ICE detention center down in Texas today, and...

I kept scrolling.

To many, it may feel like the world is on fire.

Hell... it may feel hot in your own hometown.

I don't want to discredit the fact that there is an existential threat in the United States... I believe there is.

But... how and what can I... {or you} do about it?

Because, from what I'm seeing and hearing around me is that, whatever happened in Texas today actually feels like it affects how people are thinking and feeling 1,120 miles away in my rural county.

Like somehow, the existential threat that far away could potentially be lurking around the next corner.

Like the spray of the firehose that is aimed at its target, is kind of splashing on to us a bit... and we gettin' wet.

I've got friends where I live who feel like it's well past a splash or two that's hitting them... they are feeling like whoever is holding the hose is deliberately beginning to take aim at them... their livelihood. I see you.

As a Christian, my faith compels me to love my neighbor... no matter where or if they go to church.

For some, I believe that they are truly feeling being threatened.

Others... seem a bit wound up in the first place, and I don't blame them... what, with all the scrolling that takes place these days.
Just my opinion.

I am not writing this to change any minds
After today's news, it was pretty easy to get on with my day. There was no need for me to respond to it immediately. I am grateful for that.

I pray for those directly effected, and trust that those truly in a position of local authority will bring the facts out into the light, and that local law enforcement will be permitted to do their job... on their timeline.

Way shortly after the shooting... those not in local authority {folks in authority but from outside the local jurisdiction} took to the socials speedy quick to claim the narrative... and assign blame.

And that is what caught my attention about today's shooting.
And compelled me to share a lesson that I learned from my friends in Ukraine and Russia {and other places too... but todays events made me go... oh yeah... that story.

It's the year 2014.

Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 is in the air over Ukraine.

It's a passenger plane. A Boeing 777. Just a big tube full of people going from one place to another. Families headed on vacation. AIDS researchers on their way to a conference. 298 souls in total.

And then... from 33,000 feet... it's just gone.

Not an engine failure. Not a storm. It was shot out of the sky. The wreckage, and the lives that were on board, rained down over fields of sunflowers.

The smoke from the wreckage hadn't even cleared before the stories began. {And fast. Incredibly fast.}

If you were in Kyiv, or listening to the news coming out of the West, the story was pretty clear. Russian-backed separatists in the eastern part of the country, a hotbed of conflict, had fired a sophisticated surface-to-air missile. A Buk missile launcher. The kind of thing you don't just buy at a surplus store. The kind of thing a government {like Russia} would have to provide.

To them, the facts were simple, the blame was clear. It was a horrific, tragic mistake made by reckless actors using a weapon given to them by their powerful neighbor in Russia
.
The facts were aimed squarely east.

But... if you were in Moscow, or watching the news coming out of Russia, a different story began to form. And then another one. And another. None of them consistent with the one before it.

It wasn't a Buk missile, the first story went. It was a Ukrainian fighter jet that had been tailing the passenger plane and shot it down. They even had an "eyewitness" and some grainy radar data to prove it.

Then another story bubbled up. It was a missile, but it was fired by the Ukrainian military itself, from Ukrainian-controlled land, in a twisted "false flag" operation to make Russia and the separatists look like monsters.

They said the plane was full of dead bodies before it even took off, a ghoulish plot by Western intelligence. They said the real target was Vladimir Putin's presidential plane, which was supposedly flying a similar route.

Sus kept gettin more sus... and then even more sus.

Until it didn't matter any more. The falsehoods had already gained a foothold in peoples minds... until the next episode... then wash, rince, repeat...

One event. Two completely different, warring realities, born in the same instant.

And my friends in Ukraine and Russia... they were stuck. They had to choose a story.

The story you chose, the one you shared on your social media, the one you argued about over dinner... it signaled whose side you were on. The truth of what happened to those 298 people became secondary to the story you needed to be true.

That's

Michelle Petz

9/27/2025 08:08:25 am

You are absolutely right. Hatred on social media is nothing new, but it feels sharper now because of how quickly it spreads. The anonymity and speed of these platforms make it effortless for cruelty to take root and multiply. What might have once been a quiet disagreement between neighbors is now a public brawl, magnified far beyond our community.

Both sides often claim the moral high ground while falling into the same destructive patterns. The real loss is that meaningful dialogue gets drowned out by the loudest voices of outrage. Recognizing how easily hatred takes hold online is the first step toward resisting it and toward choosing not to feed the cycle ourselves.

Thank you for naming this difficult truth.

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The View From Here: We Have Become Dogmatic When We Differ

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