Pen-Elayne on the Web

There's Only You and Me, and We Just Disagree

A trip around the blogosphere today, as well as reading some comments to posts herein, have inspired me to write a bit about the political spectrum, strange bedfellows, yadda yadda. Through the years I've gotten used to responding to the question, "So, are you a conservative or a liberal?" by either explaining, "Neither, I'm a progressive armchair radical slightly to the left of the late great Abbie Hoffman and my POV is usually not even acknowledged as existing in most mainstream media" or, my preferred answer, "I'm an Elayne-ist." Which is to say, in the first place I don't know that every single political opinion I have can be neatly pigeonholed as one or the other, 'cause I think the range of officially-allowed opinion is awfully narrow for such a big gal as myself. And secondly, I've been known to change my mind as I've gone through life and encountered people whose ideas make me rethink things. I'm not all evangelical about it, like the people Tom Tomorrow (see link at left bar) mentions in his rant today, and besides I'll probably always hold progressive, open-minded ideals more than I'll embrace politically conservative, status-quo thinking, but I just have trouble viewing the people who do embrace that mindset as some sort of Axis of Evil or Vast Conspiracy. I see them as just people who believe different things than I do. I don't think of most of them as black-and-white, no-shades-of-gray monsters, you know? Well, Kissinger excepted, I've hated him for decades and I'm not about to relent on that. But still, I do impressions of him, y'know (it's basically Ahnuld slowed down with a bit of Elmer Fudd thrown in), and I think his "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac" line was pretty spot-on. And he was a Jew in Nixon's cabinet, no mean feat.

But I digress. I can't, I won't waste energy blanketly despising most conservatives or even liberals just because of what they believe. Many members of my own family are of a conservative bent (BTW, happy birthday to my "baby" brother Jay, 40 years old today and doubtless tooling about in his Lexus SUV), and I've long since passed the point of deriving any pleasure from arguing with them. Mom and I came to a détente about All Things Israel about a decade ago, and our agreement to Just Not Raise The Subject Again improved our relationship enormously. Hey, we're none of us in this world alone, nor I suspect would we wish to be. If we're to grow together as civilized beings at all, we have to accept the fact that we're all coming at things from different views based on our different experiences and backgrounds. And sometimes we can convince each other, if all parties are open-minded enough, to see things in a new way. And sometimes we can't, and it needn't create an Us Vs. Them situation every single bloody time. The more we demonize people for not agreeing with everything we stand for straight on down the line, the more we become like the fanatics who self-justify doing sick and dangerous things. That's not how you grow as a person or a society.

So: I'm generally in favor of whatever helps us survive and get along better. I'm in favor of health, work that creates and maintains rather than destroying and pays a decent wage to people, the right to happiness and dreams and all that, courtesy, inclusion (I mean, I get positively pouty when I'm not included in someone's mindset, even language-wise, just because I'm A Gurl), peace and quiet, breatheable air and drinkable water and edible food, and stuff that just makes common sense to me. I'm against negativity and intolerant of intolerance. I support the idea of believing in any sort of Great Cosmic Being you want to as long as you keep it to yourself unless the topic comes up and don't hurt or kill other people who believe in a different GCB or have other feelings about cosmic stuff altogether. I believe that doing positive things and having talented friends creates energy, whereas spouting negative opinions and keeping high-maintenance friends saps energy, and I believe it would be really keen if I followed my own bliss more often in that particular area. And lastly, because I've probably blabbed too long anyway, I believe there's more on heaven and on earth than is dreamt of in any of our philosophies, and it totally wouldn't kill us to listen to each other more often before jumping to knee-jerk conclusions and labelling each other.