I Don’t Want To Pick A Side!
May 15th, 2008Whenever election time comes around and all the candidates become poised in partisan battles the urge for people to label their peers liberal or conservative becomes more appealing.
I always find this cycle tiring because friends, family and readers try to slap some sort of label on me and they almost always fail miserably. Generally the political identity they paint me with tells me a lot about how they identify themselves.
I realized this today when I was checking my Email. I received an obnoxious forward from an Egyptian friend, born and raised in the U.S. and who talks as if he has a live feed from George Bush wired right into his ear.
He’s a republican but not for any governmental policy reasons, he’s a republican because he hates gays, immigrants and “terrorists”. He’s the, “they attack us because they are jealous of our freedom” type. Sometimes talking to him about politics is like talking to an Alabama baptist preacher who goes hunting on Saturdays and to Ku Klux Klan rallies on Fridays. Essentially, he’s like most Social Republicans, paranoid and terrified of the world around him.
His email today had the header, “This is more for my Liberal wack job friends!”. Unbelievable, we’ve had our fair share of conversations about politics which usually consist of him repeating something he heard in a George Bush Speech or on Hannity & Colmes and me telling him how irritating I think it is. Somehow that makes me some liberal “wack job”.
Ironically I was having a conversation with a young idealist Egyptian friend the night before. He’s your stereotypical college liberal who believes the world can be a utopia, poverty can be eradicated, plants have feelings, and we should all ride bicycles to work because cars are bad for the environment. He’s the “free tibet and the Dali Lama” type. Conversations with him are beyond frustrating, its a lot like talking to someone on LSD, and for all I know that might be the reason for his radically illogical liberal views. For some reason I enjoy talking politics with him because part of me believes I can bring him back to the real world.
On this occasion he asked for my views on U.S. foreign policy and in the course of the conversation he discovered that my views were critical of U.S. foreign policy and his response was, “wow I thought you were a conservative nut job”. What the hell is going on here?
Well its not that complicated to understand the issue with both of these assholes. I’m a moderate, I’m in the middle of the spectrum, some conservative principles makes sense to me and some liberal principles makes sense to me, thats hard for people to understand though. People’s minds enjoy labels, they like to see black and white, gray is much harder to process.
To a conservative I’m liberal, to a liberal I’m conservative. You can test this phenomenon yourself. Ask a liberal if the media is conservative or liberal and ask a conservative the same. The liberal will almost always say its conservative and the conservative will almost always say its liberal. To them it is, anything to the center of their position is the opposite to them. For my readers, especially new ones, my position can be hard to understand, they come looking for one definitive side of the spectrum. Sorry you wont find that here, you probably never will.
A long time ago when this blog was in its infantile stages I was talking to Monkey Face and he gave me some advice, he said “you need to pick one definitive side and go with it”, explains a lot doesnt it 
. I dont deny that readers respond more to the demagoguing of political affiliations but thats not the answer, progress requires balance, it requires deep thought and passionate heart felt opinions, if those opinions are spread along the spectrum than so be it. To be honest, I dont really care if everyone who reads it gets it.
In my life I’ve learned the most from those with balanced views and most people do they just do it differently, maybe they listen to balanced opinions, maybe they have the discipline to listen to unbalanced individuals of both sides separately.
My advice, if I’m worthy of giving it, is to stay away from extreme conservativism or liberalism, extremes of anything are destructive, the answer is in the middle.
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D.B. in my opinion, your political philosophy is in keeping with universal notions of common sense.
It is the case that truth is usually to be found somewhere in the middle between two extremes. Truth is not absolute, but relative. And the truth of a matter can change depending on the circumstances at hand. Aristotle was one of the first philosophers to discuss this when he came up with The Golden Mean. If you were to ask Aristotle, “What is courage?” he would probably say that it is somewhere between being foolhardy and being a coward. Like you say, it’s somewhere in the middle.
I don’t know why people delight in labeling one another. It is probably related to the notion of ego. I am this, and you are that. I belong to this group, and you belong to that one. Since I know that my group is right, that makes your group wrong.
The trouble is that the search for truth does not coincide with the designation of labels. Truth emerges as you look at the facts, and weigh the facts in accordance with the values and principles which you consider valid, becuase they have been proven over time. Labels are not so analytically based. You slap them on people because of a few words said here and there, and the superficial impressions you draw from those words. Labels have almost no correlation with truth.
So I’m with you. The hell with the labels. Look at what people are saying, and judge for yourself what makes sense to you. Don’t worry if your conclusions take you to a place that defies labels. We’re here to ascertain the truth, not to live up to the labels that other have slapped on our backs.
Voting the person rather than the party is about the dumbest thing you can do .
The party affiliation of a candidate tells you what kind of appointments he or she is likely to make. Do you think that regulations of industry stifle productivity and damage the economy, or do you think that unregulated industries endanger the environment? Do you think that illegal immigrants are just that – illegal – and therefore should be deported when detected, or do you think that we should figure out a way to legitimize their status and make the best of what has already happened? Do you think that Iran poses a threat that must be countered before it is too late, or do you think that military action should be resorted to only after every avenue of diplomacy has been exhausted, even if it takes years or decades?
If you feel strongly about these and other matters, it is incumbent upon you to take into consideration the positions of the two major parties, for the successful candidate can be counted on to appoint to the offices responsible for answering these questions men and women whose views reflect the party’s platform. Voting the person, however attractive or impressive he or she may be, could very well get you four years of policies you detest.
In other words, policy differences are party differences, and it is hard to see how you could be a responsible voter if you held your nose at a whiff of party politics. If you are really interested in the way things should go in the country, come off the high pedestal and join the rest of us in the nurturing (and, yes, dirty) soil of the partisan free-for-all.