This post isn’t specifically related to the Suns, but since my contributions on this board have been almost exclusively in this forum, I request that it be permitted to remain here. I also request that my account be allowed to remain active, so that I can continue to use other features of the board, including private messages.
First of all, I need to state clearly how grateful I am to the administrators of this board for all of the time, money, and energy that they have put in over the years and continue to put in now. I have never enjoyed any internet family as much as I have enjoyed this one, and I will miss interacting with a great many of the posters here. Even though I’ve never met any of the other contributors, and in fact spoken on the phone with only one, I feel that I have many friends here. This Suns forum has been the top browser bookmark on every computer I’ve had over the last several years. It will be very hard to break the habit of checking it regularly, and in fact I doubt that I will -– I claim only that I will stop posting.
One of my most powerful memories of this board will be of what happened on September 11th, 2001. Soon after the news broke, posters flocked to this board to share their reactions. Naturally, the discourse got a bit heated at times, as everyone’s nerves were a bit frayed. But here was a group of people who, until that moment, had been united only by sports -– and electronically at that -– and who were now coming together in the face of the most terrifying national tragedy any of us had experienced. And what was most remarkable was that no one told us to assemble for this electronic town meeting: We all came on our own, driven by instinct to trust that we would be here for one another, even though there was no logical reason for us to do so.
The board was a true community then.
Recently, times have changed. A new group of moderators, surely meaning well (and, if their claims are genuine, simply following directives from above), have created an atmosphere of fear and intolerance. Posts deemed to be off-topic or raising unpopular issues get moved, reclassified, or deleted. Posters who fall out of step with the new order face censure, exile to other forums, or banishment. Where competing ideas once flowed freely, now they are compartmentalized, squelched, and systematically, aggressively devalued.
The difference is, at its heart, philosophical: Is diversity something to be embraced, or merely tolerated? A true community, in my opinion, recognizes the immeasurable value of competing ideas. It is only through having our beliefs challenged that we are forced to examine them critically, in a process that sharpens our thinking, expands our horizons, and brings us wisdom. In a pseudo-community, by contrast, everyone is already “in agreement,” content to recycle the same popular stances, in a vacuous dance that masquerades as the pursuit of true understanding but in reality is the antithesis of open-minded curiosity.
Several longtime posters have raised objections to the policy shift, and all have met with the same response: This is our board, we run it the way we want to, and if you don’t like it, leave. Well, okay. I will. I have spent thousands of hours contributing to this community in part because I believed that those contributions were appreciated. But welcoming any one voice means welcoming it in its entirety, not just to the extent that it harmonizes with what everyone else is already saying. Are the only desirable traits in any contributor limited to the things that he has in common with everybody else?
On a related note, I have become increasingly frustrated with persistent criticism from a few posters that I am uninformed, excessively pessimistic, or interested only in putting people down. I have, to be sure, often been very aggressive in pointing out what I believe to be sloppy or muddled thinking. But the fight has always been to preserve the proper relationship between evidence and conclusion, to focus properly on the substance of any debate, and to point out how far objective information can get you if you only give it a chance. The most likely explanation I can come up with for the attacks against me is that the posters responsible simply aren’t paying very careful attention; no one who has read my posts and really thought of them could reach those conclusions, even if they came away thinking that I was not a particularly nice person. Again, then, the board seems to have reached a stage where many posters want only to talk and not to listen, voices sailing right past one another, oblivious to their surroundings. Like the riddler’s tree alone in the forest, I have to ask myself: If my electronic words sail off into cyberspace without actually being read, can they really be considered communication? And if not, then why am I doing it?
It will sadden me not to share the joy of future Suns successes with this passionate, tightly knit family. But, just as on September 11th, there are issues in play that I believe go beyond sports and speak directly to our values and our sense of humanity. If this essay causes one person to open his mind just a bit more, it will have been worth the time to write. Whether that happens or not, however, I have reached the conclusion that it just isn’t appropriate for me to continue trying to do what I do in an environment that is becoming increasingly resistant and hostile.
Although I am leaving on somewhat unhappy terms, I again want to thank the board’s administrators for all they have done over the years. Overall, this site is an admirable success, and I wish you all the best.
