I got into an interesting and respectful discussion with someone on Huffington Post today concerning President Obama’s association with “Communists and Socialists.” Specifically, he was pointing out that Bill Ayers is apparently still friends with our President, and this is a bad thing.
Full disclosure, I was born in 1967, so Bill Ayers’ anti-war political activity is ancient history to me. But I do have a concern here.
I have a friend who is a minister in a strong Christian church. I doubt he is still known as the shortest man ever to drink his own body weight in beer within 24 hours and live, but back in 1984, that was one of his main achievements. He was also a heavy smoker (although I threw his cigarettes out the car window as we were driving down Washington Street in Naperville at one point) but with some strong encouragement from his friends, he eventually gave that up.
One of my friends, and one of the people I respect most, is the leader of the Tea Party movement in our area. He is very well spoken, supports a number of positions that we disagree on, but is always very respectful in our discussions and I have learned a tremendous amount from him, even though we do not always agree on everything. To his credit, I bought him a birthday card with Obama’s smiling face on the front, and he keeps it on the shelf behind him at work. “It’s a great conversation starter,” he says with his warm smile.
My wife of 23 years is a yellow dog Democrat, a real tree-hugging, social-justice advocate for the huddled masses. She has a strong sense of wrong and right, and was proud when one of our children was accused by a closed-minded teacher of having “a strong sense of justice” that he hoped our son would “grow out of.” She was incensed.
“Would it have been better if Martin Luther King, Jr. had grown out of his strong sense of justice? Ghandi? Abraham Lincoln?” She’s a little outspoken. She was the same person who, when my dad was on a rant about how the Boy Scouts were right to keep homosexuals out of scouting pointed out, “Sure, Ed – they’re definitely safer with Catholic priests, right?”
My dad, a former Roman Catholic priest, was a Gingrich supporter. He parroted back everything Fox News ever said for quite a while until two things happened. He found that being “outraged” about everything Fox found to be outraged about was very tiring, and he learned to research things that he found unusual or unlikely, like a “ground zero mosque” or “well over 90% of Planned Parenthood’s activity is abortion,” and discovered that the truth is out there, but it’s not necessarily on Fox News.
I could go on through my friend who did prison time for felony drug charges (now a respected Jiffy Lube manager with a good family), my college roommate who is an ardent gun rights supporter who fought with distinction in the Gulf War and still serves in intelligence, and my mother, who was a Reagan supporter and GOP precinct chair for his first election but quit the GOP in disgust when she saw that his plan was to bankrupt the country in an effort to cut taxes on the rich and social services for the poor, but perhaps I’ve made my point.
My iPod might play Johnny Cash when you hit play. Or the latest dance mix from DJNT. It could be Burl Ives singing “Little White Duck” if I had the kids in the car last. Or Skrillex, followed by Van Halen, followed by “God is Great, Beer is Good, People are Crazy.” But that doesn’t mean I listen to only Country, Dance, Dubstep, kids’ songs, or Rock. It just means I like music, and have lived long enough to appreciate lots of different types.
I have many friends. And when I wrote a comment on Facebook about how I felt the GOP was degrading women, my Tea Party friend wrote an impassioned reply (which I need to get back to next). My former roommate commented that he felt that “liberals” were not showing the army enough respect, and we had a lively discussion about the role of the military. My wife posted that a group in North Carolina is working to curb underage drinking, and needed our support, and we had a good talk about it. Then I posted in January that my dad had just died and we all cried together.
It’s exhausting to always be “outraged” about things that we don’t understand, agree with, or think is right. It’s difficult to be pure about our beliefs, and easy to get mad at people who hold opposite beliefs. But we can DO that in America. No thought police is going to haul us off to jail for saying that Obama is a socialist, or Rush is an idiot, or Catholic priests are more dangerous than the Boy Scouts.
We need to be able to talk, folks. I find much to agree with in all of my friends, and much room for discussion. I hold some views completely opposite from each of my friends, but that’s not because they’re a “Lib-tard” or a “Tea-bagger” or any other label. They’re not labels – they’re people, and they’re my friends. We need to find our common ground and work from there.
If that means bringing a 2012 Bill Ayers into the discussion, maybe that’s okay. I would certainly welcome the opportunity to sit down with President Obama and thank him for some of his policies and question him on others. I’d like to do the same with Dick Cheney. I actually met George W. Bush back when I lived in Texas and he was governor (“met” as in shook his hand and observed him for a while when I worked for a television station) and he was very nice in person, as most people are. Politically, he and I would disagree on most issues. But I don’t think he’s an idiot, or a socialist, or a war-monger. We simply disagree on things.
Some of your friends are liberals, homosexuals, drug users, ministers, conservatives, tree-huggers, barely making it financially, and rich beyond your wildest dreams, if you’ve lived on this earth at all. They may not bring it up in polite discussion, but it’s probably true. Does that make you a liberal, homosexual, drug-using conservative minister? Probably not.
We have a lot to learn from each other. Let’s stop the yelling, name-calling and divisive ground games and sit down and work together. I read the other day that the Chinese are ready to take over as the world’s #1 superpower. Are we going to squabble in the corner and watch it happen?
- David
The Chinese Article I was referring to: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/world/asia/chinese-insider-offers-rare-glimpse-of-us-china-frictions.html
“The senior leadership of the Chinese government increasingly views the competition between the United States and China as a zero-sum game, with China the likely long-range winner if the American economy and domestic political system continue to stumble, according to an influential Chinese policy analyst.
China views the United States as a declining power, but at the same time believes that Washington is trying to fight back to undermine, and even disrupt, the economic and military growth that point to China’s becoming the world’s most powerful country, according to the analyst….”
