Does Membership (in general) Imply Compliance?

Great Debates
1

Something I did on another messageboard caused a big brouhaha; I was wrong in many respects, but I thought the situation brought up some interesting issues about membership, ideology and the Far Left that might be worth sharing here.

This board is mostly made up of Crunchy Mamas - women who are going “all natural” as much as possible. It’s a huge place with probably 50 fora and sub-fora, things like organic gardening, the case against circumcision, how to breastfeed, homebirthing, homeschooling.

I mostly lurked there - in particular the “Gentle Discipline” threads have some terrific advice on ways to avoid smacking your kids around. Mamas who’ve “lost it” (or come close enough to scare themselves) will go there for ideas on how to handle it better next time.

I joined in the first place b/c I liked the concept of “Attachment Parenting” (www.askdrsears.com if you want to know what that means), but the other twin moms on babycenter dot com weren’t at all interested in it. Babycenter has a section on “AP”, but I found those women really smug; a lot of the gals at MDC were far more interesting. I’m a Lefty, “Green” granola-type chick myself (at least compared to my Republican family), so I thought I fit in.

After a time, though, I grew weary of one thing. Perhaps I should have heeded that as my call to leave.

Signatures. I found the prevailing signatures annoying as all get out.

“CD” “NO Vax” “NO Circ” “BF” (cloth diapers, no vaccinations, no circumcision, breastfeeding) they’d proclaim.

Or these incredibly apologetic “Tried to BF and couldn’t b/c of XYZ” notations.

Now, I should have considered that it DOES say in the masthead that this is THE Website for Natural Family Living. Or maybe I could’ve read the User’s Agreement (does anybody read those?).

Instead I thought to myself – hey, I’m a Greenie, an Earth Firster. We recycle out the ying yang, hand out literature for Lefties, donate to this and that, write letters to the editor, drive efficient cars, pick up trash at the park just because it needs to be done. My Hubby’s a fricking Environmental Microbiologist fercryinoutloud - he’s published papers on Bioremediation and is actively working in the field (as opposed to taking some higher-paying Industry position).

We eat Boca Burgers, doggone it!

But I don’t use CD and I didn’t BF. We absolutely VAX’d. And yes, we did Circ. Some of that was necessitated by having twins & no washer/dryer; some by faith in Modern Medicine; and the circ - that was my Hubby’s call (last I checked, I don’t have a penis).

Oh yes, and in addition to the Boca Burgers, we eat McNuggets, you bet your ass we do. Taking my twins to PlayLand has saved my sanity on many, many occasions.

And I thought, I can’t be the only Somewhat Crunchy mama who’s getting it done by an alternate route, necessitated by the specifics of my circumstances. I believe some other choices are great, bfeeding in particular, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of debating them there (or anywhere else, for that matter); but still, that’s not the only way of being “good”.

So I made my signature counter-revolutionary. Among the counter-revolutionaries.

“FFeeding, disposable diapering, vaccinated, plastic-toys having*, circumcised, Chicken McNuggets-feeding Mom of b/g twins”
*I forgot, that’s another Official No-No

And for a long time, nothing happened. Except I’d get the occasional thumbs-up in threads from other toddler mommies, or a PM applauding my signature.

See, I trusted that my contributions to said threads were themselves sufficiently “Crunchy” that it would be understood I was achieving “crunchieness” in the way I could, to the best of my abilities, according to my judgements.

Well, eventually management got wind of it and the kibash was put on.

And in the “SeeYaBye” thread I opened to discuss the issue, many posters wrote to say that they had, in fact, been offended by my sig. That I was invading their haven and disrespecting their values.

And I apologized, because they had a point.

But it reminds me of Church.

Because a lot of other posters wrote in to say that they, too, failed to comply with the Official Crunchy Mandate. Only they didn’t admit it anywhere. That “failing” to be “perfect” was OK, so long as you were appropriately ashemed.

And there were the ones who’d felt condemned and left from time to time.

Now, my Husband maintains that the reason Republicans get more done than Democrats is, their membership is more willing to walk in lockstep. He attributes it to mindlessness; perhaps it’s actually an extension of the values within the party.

But all of this makes me wonder.

Do members owe it to The Group to keep their Otherness under wraps? Is that even possible with complex issues? In this case I’d thought that the group was strong enough to tolerate dissension, but is that really true, or does it instead erode the core?

I’ve kind of concluded that their Leftiness is just another form of Fundamentalism. Which seems bizarre to me, I thought Liberals were supposed to be ever-inquiring. Instead they want guarantees and mandates. But is it possible to sustain a group without them?

2

Very interesting experience, fessie. As another semi-crunchy mom, I both understand where you’re coming from and can see, sort of, what the problem was. That is, I would have bet money on people being offended by your sig. (Did you ever say that you were offended by their self-righteous sigs too?)

I’m not going to use the funadmentalist word, I think I’ll go for absolutist instead. I think people on both sides (right and left, that is) can become too absolutist. It’s very easy for liberals to do, too. My first experience with that was in college–I went to a very liberal, possibly The liberal, university. People liked to talk about how open-minded and tolerant they were (now remember, we were all 19, so we’ll give slack for that), but that only lasted until they met someone they disagreed with. Then they were as intolerant as anyone could possibly be–prejudiced and unwilling to even think about other possiblities.

This is possibly especially easy to fall into with parenting. We all know from threads here what a hot-button issue parenting is! People start thinking that there is a Right Way and a Wrong Way, and that co-sleeping or whatever is right, and people who don’t do it are not only wrong but almost certainly judging the co-sleepers as crazy loons who are damaging their children, while really they’re the ones damaging their poor isolated kiddies, who are surely lonely and crying. (Note this is an example and we are not going to discuss co-sleeping!)

So crunchy mamas can get absolutist very quickly, I think, even faster than dedicated Lefties, who do it too. They(we!) see themselves as going against the mainstream, as trying to live ‘authentically’ out from under the oppression of the corporations and the Man. Or whatever. So perhaps they see a sig like yours was as a signal that you’re not really on their ‘side’ or you’re not fully committed. And pretty soon they’re seeing you as a betrayer, and we get a little mob piling-on going on, and it’s message board chaos. Probably wouldn’t happen IRL; it’s the nature of the medium that people get carried away.

But the problem is, of course, that almost no one can live a perfectly crunchy life. You only have time for so much. So I would bet that almost none of those women really live every possible tenet of the faith; they buy their clothes at Target even if they boycott Wal-Mart, or they get Happy Meals sometimes or use plastic diapers or don’t rinse out every single can for recycling or whatever. Or they don’t garden or keep bees or milk their own goats or I bet some of them don’t even live on an organic farm where they grow their own flax for making clothes as well as all their own vegetarian food.

I think it’s great that you tried to inject a little realism into the place and also tried to point out how self-satisfied the sigs were coming off. But I also think that it’s not going to work very well. The place is too big, and message boards aren’t nuanced enough. Which is too bad, since a lot of women are going to feel squished and leave eventually, since they can’t be crunchy ‘enough’–and it becomes oppressive. It’s possible that a thread addressing the topic might have worked better than a sig. But probably not. IME people just get hurt/miffed and either announce they’re leaving or start piling on.

I gotta go do some sewing now. But hey, at least you tried.

3

No vaccinations?

4

You are only responsible for the degree of compliance to which agree; it cannot (or should not) be coerced from you.

Further, membership in any group that tells you what to think rather than *how *to think is useless, IMO.

They’re out there. IIRC Bill Maher is a big proponent.

5

Yeah. Vaccinations cause autism, you know. :smack:

6

A church is by nature a community of believers. People who don’t believe… don’t fit very well in the church. They may not disagree over big things; you would be surprised how much disagreement some version fo Christianity can accept. However, if you don’t believe, why would you be going there?

I’ve always been bemused by leftists claiming that Republicans march in lockstep. We disagree about everything. Push come to shove, we either find a compromise position… or we don’t. It’s possible we have a cultural attitude that rates coming to a consencus higher than Democrats or Greens. But to assert that we’re mindless is… insulting. Conservative thought ranges a broad spectrum from Libertarian to Neocon to Conservative to Religious Right. But most of these people agree on most things. There are some big differences, though.

What seems strange to me is the diverse, or perhaps more acurately, unconnected nature of the Democrats. it strikes me that there are more single-issue subgroups, who have little interest or reason in working closely with others in the party. The Teacher’s Union has little to do with the Black Leadership wing, which has little to do with the Greens, which has little to do with Traditional Unions, etc. Cobbling together a coherent line out of that is much harder.

7

I may have forgotten to address the actual OP in my personal rant. So here’s some more.

I think it’s important that we all recognize our ‘Otherness,’ as you say, and accept it. Almost any group will become intolerable otherwise. To use an extreme example, I once read something by Stalin that said that everyone had to be in the middle of the group. No one could be on the side edges, in the front or the back. All belonged in the middle. And of course, we remember Stalin’s habit of killing people whom he felt were too close to the sides; his group became ineffective and unliveable because he killed most of the members (to simplify outrageously, heh heh).

This becomes particularly important in parenting, because we mommies need all the support and help we can get. When we accuse each other of doing it wrong and judge one another harshly over minor parenting-philosophy points, we hurt ourselves as well as each other, because we lose potential friendships. When we are afraid to admit our imperfections as mothers, we lose a lot of support and isolate ourselves from our community.

As mothers, I think it’s immensely important to fight the automatic harsh judgement that we all find ourselves falling into. We accuse each other of being uncaring or bad mothers if we disagree, and that is awful. Even worse is the way we assume others are judging us, so that we hide and don’t admit our difficulties, and make things look more perfect than they are. We’ve built a standard for motherhood that no one can ever attain, and that only hurts all women.

Crunchiness as a lifestyle philosophy is one that cannot be lived perfectly. So it is very important that we accept one another’s differing priorities as valid, or we won’t have any friends at all. And if we’re afraid to admit that we’re not perfectly crunchy, that won’t help anyone; newcomers will be overwhelmed and discouraged, and the others will be isolated by fear that they will be found out as inferior.

Again, however, I think it’s important to realize that liberals are at least as prone to absolutism as conservatives. (And your husband needs to get to know some real-life conservatives, rather than dismissing them all as mindless drones. That doesn’t help anyone either, and incidentally smacks of…absolutism!)

8

fessie,

If you haven’t already, I recommend that you read Greenback’s Pit thread “I’m on a Highway to Hell” . In it, in between discussion of exactly what various terms used to describe creationism and intelligent design mean, there is significant disccussion of when or whether one should leave a community because the beliefs of the leader are not your own. See in particular my post #90 wherein I describe why I didn’t leave a church where my beliefs about how literally the Bible should be interpreted were not the same as the pastor’s beliefs.

9

Trying again–post #90

This makes 3 tries, the first one failed when I previewed, but accidently closed the window in which I was composing the post, rather than one of the links.

10

I’m sorry about the “mindless” jab; it wasn’t supposed to be a jab so much as a “gee, these Lefties are expecting the kind of mindlessness that my Hubby had attributed to the Right.” Didn’t quite come out that way.

Thanks for taking the time to write, Dangermom; I know that your life is incredibly busy. And I agree, it IS good for him to be getting to know some Conservatives IRL (we live in a Red state now).

11

Eh, I know it isn’t really on topic; but I have a good friend who is ‘becoming’ a ‘crunchy-momma’. She is doing so mostly because she believes Vaccinations caused her one child to have autisum (though all testing shows he does not have autisum). I have noticed that she is becoming less and less tolerant (from comparison of her previously ‘moderate’ attitudes); where in she doesn’t want to discuss any possibilities beyond what her ‘group’ of ‘crunchy-momma’s’ accept (which means believing one group of studies over another, or one group of authors, or even ‘disowning’ people who disagree with them).

I think what you will find is the further from the ‘middle’ you get on ANY topic (from either side) people become less and LESS tolerant (PETA members throwing paint on people who wear ‘animals’ and/or pro-life people blocking clincs; different ‘sides’ same issues. Heck take it further, Earthfirsters spiking trees where people might/will be killed and ‘anti-immigration’ people killing ‘illegals’)