Listening to Romney’s speech at the Republican convention. He very clearly takes the position of “us” versus “them.” (In what I feel is a stark contrast to Obama’s hope for One America.) Romney even had the audacity to claim that we can fix Washington by putting in a conservative president.
… Huh? …
Apparently Romney accidentally used a speech from 8 years ago. Note, by the way, Romney began his speech by railing about a “liberal” court. Of the current 9 chief justices, 7 of them were appointed by Republicans.
Roberts - George W
Alito - George W
Suitor - Bush daddy
Thomas - Bush daddy
Kennedy - Reagan
Scalia - Reagan
Stephens - Ford
Ginsberg - Clinton
Breyer - Clinton
….
This is one of my main problems with politics in general: the need to paint everything as “us versus them.” We’ve gotta ditch this idea that a given position is the only one and that there are no good reasons to think any other way. Reality is much more complex than such a black-and-white-only mentality. That does not mean that we can’t have preferences or even strongly held beliefs. It is important to acknowledge that others also have strongly held beliefs, for reasons that are completely logical to them.
I like dogs. I don’t like cats. Yet I have good, intelligent and respectable friends who love cats. They even go so far as to have cats roaming around their houses!! Certainly that means that they are evil! … If I take the oversimplified belief that cats are “wrong,” then I have simply overlooked the reasons to love a cat. The risk, of course, is that I will start to think of those friends as “cat people” - putting them, wholesale, into a category different from me, rather than recognizing we are much more alike than different. Anyway, you get the picture.
Too much of this us-versus-them talk. Too much pointing out differences and not enough pointing out similarities.
It’s all so strange. Creepy and eerie I would say…
Here’s an idea:
At the beginning of every election, all of America turns in their party affiliation, resets to zero, forgets the past, and actually looks at the issues and qualifications of each candidate. Then we vote. My biggest fear is that people vote in their head long before the candidates are decided.
