I felt compelled as the Editor of Cycle Source Magazine, even though the World Report is an independent forum from it, to step in and add some commentary after today’s flurry of comments and emotion resulting from the Discovery Channel Build Off between Jess James And The Tuttels. While many of you may be used to our old format where this was a nice purveyor of news and product information, it has long been our goal to turn this blog into more of a Huffington Post of the motorcycle world. What that means is we want it to be more than just a stream of news and such and move it into becoming a real part of our time and culture. And here’s why…..
We live in some pretty turbulent times right now. People are out of work, the government is out of control, BOTH SIDES, and the main stream media at large is full of shit! Over many a long night we have all discussed how badly our world today needs a Hunter S. Thompson. Being a big fan of the late Dr.’s work I can tell you that his keen knife of sever sarcasm and brutal honesty would cut through the bullshit that is served up to us on a daily basis. This is why, with eyes closed at one point, I let the post and all the comments that went with it today run in its entirety, almost unchecked and free. I saw early this morning how emotionally invested all of our readers were in this argument and I decided that until someone began to threaten another person we would just let it go. This was not popular with everyone, one poster took us off his list, that’s ok, it has to be this way. Just this month I lost a subscriber because he didn’t like something I wrote in the “Past 30 Days” inside the magazine. Now, we don’t want to loose anyone from the magazine or the blog but one thing has to happen right now in our society, we have to be able to talk, argue, dispute, scream if need be, whatever it takes but we MUST decide what we believe in and be able to enter an intellectual discussion about it so that we can agree on ways to move forward. So what I wish the subscriber would have done was sent in his point of view, and the main reason why we let the blog run free today as well.
Lemme, and I love him to death for it, is a young man full of emotion and smart as hell too. He is one of the most well read individuals of any I know and while you may not agree with his positions or delivery you would do well to think about your responses before just throwing something out there at him. He is only one of our new additions to the blog, you can expect to see much more activity one this site from this day forward until we do settle into what we are trying to make it. I can say that we do not want it to be a malicious hate fest but we will not keep people from speaking their minds just to avoid someone getting their feelings hurt. There’s too much on the line today, people are loosing their homes, they are having a hard time feeding their families, keeping their jobs, it’s not enough that we divide our selves up into groups of people who think and talk like us, only watch or read what that group is into or quit anything we disagree with. It’s time for us to define who we are as a people, what we stand for and where we go from here. It’s been long enough that we all stand around and bitch about things and start taking a stand for what we believe in and get something done.