Liberal/Conservative

I was talking with my mentor a few years ago and he said, “Hugh, you call yourself a liberal and I call myself a conservative and yet, we believe essentially the same things.” I agreed with him. Now bear in mind we were not just talking politics but religion and general philosophy as well. In my professional life and personal life my friends have been various degrees of liberals and conservatives, but in essence we believe in the same things. We pick and choose among the pieces of those platforms and come up with a commonality that is more important to us than our dissimilarities. Bear in mind this is on the personal level.

Now you place us in public arena where there is a degree of anonymity and we often can come out fighting and emphasize our differences rather than our similarities and often use inflammatory language we wouldn’t consider using in personal conversation.

You can even see that among political folk. They can say absolutely terrible things about each other in a public forum and then leave that public debate and act cordially and politely as the best of friends, and they often are. Teddy Kennedy was a great example of this. He was the lion of liberality and use tradition liberal rhetoric to pound home his views and debate skills to promote his causes. But he genuinely loved his peers in congress and they he. It was obvious.

I often see such behavior on Facebook. From the safety of their computer keyboard they will say awful things about people and issues that would be downright embarrassing if the said personally.

It seems to me that all debate should mirror our personal conversations. Now I know there are kooks that will say awful things both publicly and privately, but I think they are not the norm.

As our nation grows larger and larger this becomes a bigger problem. Civility is lost as we lose intimate touch with each other. In the increase of population we then pick groups that are most like ourselves and then we can demonize those who do not think as we do and cast dispersions of them in hurtful and mean ways.

There was a time when you said American values it meant something. Now that is not as clear as we keep forming groups of conflict.

It is another paradox, the larger we get the smaller our thinking becomes. It is sad and it I wish it wasn’t so.

That was and is the purpose of this blog. We are to put out our ideas – mine usually – but hopefully they are said with a sense in intimacy, good naturedness and openness and received the same way.

As my mentor said, we may use different terms to describe ourselves but basically we believe the same things.