Submitted by poster ‘Chiefy1724’
Let’s face it. Take five minutes and have a look through any of the blogs and forums where the hordes of ‘cybernats’, ranting or otherwise, hang out. Here, quirkynats, Blether with Brian, Nick Robinson, Betsan. We spend a lot of time talking to ourselves.
Sure, we respond to topics and articles, and to the usual suspects amongst our unionist brothers and sisters. Daily, we gird our loins into battle, hammer happily away at our keyboards and go home at the end of the day satisfied that we fought the good fight and that The Glorious Day is that bit closer because of our efforts.
Indeed, quirkynats and Newsnetscotland sprung up because there seemed to be a demand in posts to BwB that needed filled – a place where Nationalists and others of a pro-independence view could cogitate, consider, digest and talk amongst ourselves. You don’t get our unionist brothers and sisters here. They know that they’d get blasted. The articles here are what WE would consider a fair and unbiased view of stories important to Scotland when compared with the Mainstream Scottish Media.
Is The Glorious Day any closer because of the time that we spend in cyberspace?
Now, personally, the whole process of blogging and responding in forums has helped me tremendously. I was what you would probably call a “gut” Nationalist. I joined the party after returning from a spell in London almost as a reaction to my time there. I was an academic, and even in the halls of learning, was exposed to attitudes and thoughts that I realised were total anathema to everything that I believed in.
As some of you will have heard me say before, I realised that ‘We’ are not ‘They’, and ‘They’ are not ‘Us’. And that our best path forward was to separate from this Union.
So, to ‘cybernatting’. I am a member of the SNP. I am a fundamentalist, not a gradualist. I don’t agree with everything that the party says, but what my time on the net has meant is that I have learned that we are a broad church. More unites us than divides us, because above all we believe in putting the interests of the people before those of the party or the establishment. There’s a lot of things that we can all sign up to and we can argue the minutiae back and forth.
And that is the problem. We do. We spend too much time on forums like these talking to ourselves.
The real fight is not here in cyberspace. It is out there, in the real world, with the voters of Scotland. We can hammer away on websites until the asteroid strikes and the cockroaches take over. 99% of the voters of Scotland will not be watching or listening or contributing.
We need to be out on the streets and the doorsteps saying, THIS is what a SNP Government means to you.
It means a National Health Service, free at the point of delivery, with no prescription charges. It means rebuilding an education system decimated by the last 30 years of Tory and Labour misrule. It means delivering policies for the benefit of the people of this Scotland. It means taking control of our own future.
For us, it means standing on the street corner dishing out the leaflets and knocking on doors. It means getting involved with our local branches. It means fundraising and going to meetings.
It means coming out of cyberspace and talking to the people who we want to vote for an SNP Government and an Independent Scotland.