Land of the Free

I used to like to share my humble political opinions…

Who am I kidding?  My political beliefs have never been humble.   Ever.  I have extraordinarily strong political beliefs, and for the longest time I enjoyed sharing them.  This stems from the humble belief that my beliefs are correct, and if every one just took a step back and looked at reason, they would all believe the same thing that I do.  The problem isn’t with different viewpoints.  I always thought that the problem was that other people just chose the wrong viewpoint.

Perhaps that opinion has changed, but I doubt it.  I still pretty much always think I’m right.  That’s humility at its finest folks.

But in all seriousness, I absolutely loved debating people on political issues.  If there was some big decision or election, you could bet that I was right there stating my opinion loudly and strongly.  And I loved it when people argued back.  It gave me a chance to show them the error of their ways.  I thrived on it.  Occasionally it would really annoy me, but over all, those debates made my day.

And then it stopped being fun.  Arguments were taken out of the political arena and were made personal.  People didn’t abide by the rules of civility.  People didn’t assume honest motives in the other side.  They attacked character.  At one point, someone actually leaped up from a table and started calling me horrible names before storming off.

Once the character attacks came (from people on both sides,) I stopped engaging in the arguments.  It was hard to take people seriously when they were flinging vitriol.  See, perhaps I’m silly, but if you start questioning the moral character of my opponents, I will start to question you.  After all, there’s something weak about an argument that requires mudslinging.

And so it has been probably a couple of years since I have stated my political opinions publicly.  It was a peaceful couple of years.  But then this whole Hobby Lobby situation happened, and I once again believed that if only I stated my (true) opinions clearly enough, the whole situation would be cleared up.  Everyone would read my ideas, agree that I’m right, and we would all sit around holding hands and singing songs.  Really, it would have been beautiful.

But the more I engaged in these debates, the more it became clear to me that as a society, we really have no desire to see the value in the other side.  We don’t see a need or a benefit to compromise.  We all believe we are right and the other is wrong, and I am so caught up in that mindset that it would be laughable if it weren’t so sad.

The thing is that we live with other people.  And I don’t think very many people like that.

We all know our Bill of Rights (or at least the rights that matter to us.)  We know what we deserve.  We know what we want to tell Uncle Sam to bug off about.

But what about the other side?

What happens when our rights infringe on the rights of others?  What happens when their rights infringe on us?  Because that’s going to happen.  It has to happen when you live in a community.  If we all did whatever we thought we had the right to, we essentially would be living in chaos.  Centuries before we were born, people made the decision that they didn’t want to live as a bunch of solitary nomads. They saw a benefit to community.  They decided that putting aside some of their own freedoms in order to join up with other people and form something greater was worth the sacrifice.  They learned that they might not be able to take whatever they want, but it was worth it to have someone else on their side.

And they disagreed.  At one point it led to a civil war.  But more than that, there have been political debates for as long as politics has existed.  What I fear is different today is that we all see ourselves as a nation of individuals and we desperately want to protect the rights of our own individual person at the singular expense of other people and of the community as a whole.

I’m a liberal.  A very passionate liberal.  I’m not a Democrat and I don’t vote Democrat because of a couple of issues that I can’t morally support.  However I supported Hobby Lobby in the recent debacle, so perhaps it’s from that state of victory that I am writing this.  But I would like to think it’s more than that.   I would like to think that I would be willing to make sacrifices for the greater good.  That I would lay down some of my rights so that the rights of others could be heard.

Who knows.

But what I do know is that sometime about a decade ago, we stopped being a nation of people and we started to be a nation of “with us or against us.”  We separated.  Red and blue, right and left.  Us versus them.  Good versus bad.  We lost that sense of the common good, and at least as of thus far, we haven’t gotten it back yet.

I find that sad, but more than that, I find it dangerous.  A people cannot stand when they are divided at every turn.  And we can’t help but be divided when we focus more on what separates us than on what unites us.

We are a broken people.  A fractured people.  My hope is that we can find our way back and that we can find our way back on our own.  That a million different people can direct their hearts and their hopes towards a common good.  That we learn to accept personal disappointment and that we learn to sacrifice some of what we feel is important so that we can move forward together.

Right now things don’t work.  They don’t work at the national level or the local or the interpersonal level.  I think that much is pretty apparent.  Perhaps none of us can change the world or change our country, but perhaps we can change the tone of our own dialogue.  Perhaps we can try to understand before we try to defend.  Perhaps we can temper our language.  And perhaps we can seek the commonality before the differences.  And if enough people do that, perhaps we will spark some change, like a pebble hitting the ocean waves.  Perhaps it won’t do any good.  But perhaps it will.

This country was built on the premise that people have the right to govern themselves.  Let’s live up to that premise and start to lead from the bottom up.  It would be pretty remarkable if we made a difference.