Steve Waldman in his On Belief on Beliefnet ("Perverted, God-Hating Frenchies vs. Inbred, Sex-Obsessed Yokels ") makes this statement:

On both sides, discourse now moves swiftly from disagreement into demonizing, from contrast to caricature. The worst motives are always assumed. Both camps have polemicists who win popularity, ratings, and book sales by devising ever more clever ways of ripping the eyelids off their opponents. We all know the visceral satisfactions of hanging out with our home-team blogs and watching the TV or radio stations that fit our worldview. Our politicians and pundits happily supply us with the voodoo dolls and the pins. But we'd be smarter not to use them.I’m not saying the conflicting values aren’t profound and important. But I am saying that if we choose to find the legitimate underpinnings of our ideological opponents' arguments, we can. It may not be as much fun, but it is more patriotic.

I think he's really on to something here. It seems that with more and more individual activity on the Internet and more and more targeting of the public media--radio, television, magazines, etc.--people only hear, much less listen to, folks that already agree with them. They only notice the home team. We have so many communications options these days that we don't have to hear anyone that doesn't already agree with us unless we want to. How can you learn that way? How can a person think? What how can they stretch their thinking or step back from their assumptions if all they expose themselves to only reinforces what they already think? Have we become a nation of cowards, afraid to hear anyone or anything that doesn't agree with us because they might say something worth considering? How sad that so many of us are so afraid or so lazy.

I agree that it's much more fun to go at our opponents with daggers and flame throwers. But at some point we have to listen to other ideas or we really will slip back into the Dark Ages that so many fear. Only this time it won't be because of a lack of education or opportunities, but from a lack of courage.