Those Damn Liberals

My daughter home from college this Christmas season got me talking about my understanding of liberal people.   Coupling that with the polarization I see emerging from the Arizona shootings I begin to think about their being a solution to this seemingly never ending battle between the two major political factions.

Challenged for my understanding of liberals - I struggled with how to define Liberals and what is so obviously wrong with them.  I mean seriously, how do I begin to define a group of people who think so different from those like me? 

Liberals like to say they are looking ahead and not behind, they welcome new ideas, they care about the welfare of people like health, housing and schools, their jobs, civil rights, and civil liberties.  Liberals believe they can break through the old boundaries and create a new social world of fairness and equality. 


Here's the rub -  I believe we all embraced these same concerns - although we see different solutions on how to achieve them.

Conservatives believe that being liberal means deciding issues based on knee-jerk feelings and not on comprehensive facts.  Some think liberal opinions are reached without carefully and fully thinking through the risks and costs which conservatives hold out as the holy-grail of good decision making.

Liberals want to try new policy believing it wouldn't hurt to try it.   Conservative are not at all willing to experiment with policy for fear recovering from mistakes will be paid for dearly.

So how do we unite the two sides and stop the war between liberals and conservatives?

I go back to when I was a youth and fighting with my own brothers: 

Big fight - all hell breaking loose.  Furniture tipping over, dog barking, sister crying....

The fighting was stopped.  It was not allowed to continue or escalate to where the house was on fire.   The yelling and screaming at each other, the war of hateful words and threats and mud-slinging was just plain stopped.   A parent would intervene, get both our sides of the story and both of us would be made to understand the other persons feelings, or ownership etc. and then we would both be scolded for bad behavior. "It takes two to tangle" I heard a million times.   We would have to shake hands and apologize and would often discover we could go beyond the 'feelings' of the moment and work or play together.   Sometimes becoming best of friends.

So how do we do that in America?   How do we stop the fighting?

I believe we just stop it.   Leaders on both sides - in the White House, the Senate and House of Representatives, State Congress and in all political corners stand up and say ENOUGH!   It's OVER!  We shake hands,  We make hate speak not a tool to win the argument but unwelcome behavior.  We talk facts, We debate what is being discussed so we understand each others 'side' to the topic, we argue without threats, ridicule and mud-slinging,  and we vote.  And that's the end to it.

We did it with the N-word - we can do it in regards to the hate-speak.   We stop the hate speak arguments and just tell our side of the story - and move on. 

We all know what happens when we tried to re-ignite the flames.