kudzurunner
5539 posts
Jun 17, 2015
3:51 AM
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I've been absent from the forum and anything like supervisory/administrative oversight for the past few days because I've been 1) traveling to and from Chicago to play in the blues festival; and 2) finishing my seven-year project, a book on the devil and the blues. During the last couple of days, even as the Rachel Dolezal "case" explodes across the American popular media, this forum seems to have gone slightly nuts on the subject of identity politics, political correctness, etc.
I've always said that this forum should be a place where anything that falls within the purview of the words "blues" and "harmonica" is game for discussion, with the occasional off-topic thread allowed. But tolerance has its limits. Tolerance works when people know how to behave themselves--as they did for a while in a thread about whether black people can play classical music. But a policy of tolerance fails, or rather requires hands-on adjustment, when members of this forum fail to obey the forum creed and presume reasonably good intentions on the part of their fellow forum members.
I'd like to thank our administrator Nate, once again, for stepping in and, with firmness, intelligence, and good humor, and bringing things back into something like alignment. I'd also like to agree with Joe L. and timeistight--members with whom I have strongly disagreed from time to time--that silly season is not a place anybody wants to spend much time.
Truth is, this place has been both high-spirited AND well-behaved, for quite a while now. Suddenly, in the space of a day, four or five threads get locked. That's not good--but it was required. Now it's time for all of us, every member, to take a deep breath and calm the f**k down.
Thank you. I just had to say that. I feel much better now.
If you wish, you may conjure the voice of Simon Cowell in your head. "This is a SINGING COMPETITION!" he used to groan in exasperation when things on American Idol veered off the rails. Here, the equivalent phrase is "This is a BLUES HARMONICA forum!" Let's do our best, please, to return to our core focus for the next little while. From my perspective, this means focusing on threads that are concerned with both words, "blues" and "harmonica," and not OT topics, much as those topics may fascinate us. It pains me, frankly, to have to rein (or reign) things in like this, since I don't consider you folk to be draft horses, or me to be the King. But still: this would be a good moment to pause and recenter.
This forum has had other moments of high passion, when things got messy. It has survived every last one of them. We'll be OK. Time to move on, though.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Jun 17, 2015 3:58 AM
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