—Stealing America—
Opinion 12
Abstract
Here, I argue that radical conservative factions in the USA have been methodically overriding social and constitutional norms to take control of the country. Rather than a simple conservative versus liberal argument, I seek to make the point that the path one follows is determined by whether the person is guided solely by human instincts or if those instincts are moderated by the person’s spiritual nature.
A Spiritual View of the USA
It is my opinion that no one is deliberately wrong. For every act, there is an underlying motivation. To understand the choices a person makes, it is necessary to look for the motivation that underlies their choices and the motivation that came before that. Ultimately, we are guided by urges that are usually beyond our conscious awareness.
Since I have written extensively about how we develop perception and the underlying influences on our decision making, to make this essay a little less complex, I will refer you to the relevant essays and ask that you take time to look them over if you have questions.
Humanism and Discerning Intellect
Abstract: In the context of this essay, our discerning intellect is an enlightened motivator that moderates our baser, human instincts. If the ideal citizen is one who seeks progression in cooperation with others, rather than at the expense of others, their discerning intellect must dominate decision-making. This Opinion is an exploration of the difference between our human’s instincts and our discerning intellect and how we might move toward a more humanist society.
Abstract: This Opinion includes introduction of the Temperament Mediated Perception (TMP) model. Although the first appearance with this title, the model has been evolving from the early version discussed in the Implicit Cosmology. As it stands now, I believe it is largely complete. Future writing will be concerned with explaining its implications. It should not be considered true until it is vetted by informed reviewers. (Watch ethericstudies.org for updates.
In brief, TMP is the argument that our perception is passed to our conscious awareness by way of our mostly unconscious mind, influenced by human instincts and colored by learned expectation. The core perceptual process appears to be moderated by inherited temperament-related traits.
My intention in writing this Opinion is to explain the relationship between unconsciously sensed and consciously perceived information with emphasis on the need to consciously intend to see reality as it is, rather than how we are taught
Abstract: To be lucid is to sense reality as it actually is and not as we have been taught. Lucidity is the clarity of sensing that we develop as we gain in spiritual maturity. Thus, a seeker after wisdom is one who is becoming more lucid in understanding and perception.
Lucidity is not natural to a person, which is defined here as immortal personality entangled with a human avatar, because the human Instincts dominate the relationship unless they are overridden by intention guided by discerning intellect. This is the oldest of ancient wisdom.
The relationship between our immortal self and our human avatar is described in this essay with suggestions for how to become more lucid.
From my study, after all of the influence of culture and learned responses are accounted for, the most fundamental influences on our decision making are our human’s instincts. Those are primarily concerned with behaviors needed to assure the continuation of its gene pool, and preferably, for its gene pool to dominate all other gene pools.
Our spiritual instincts only have a meaningful influence on our decision making if we learn to consciously interrupt the influence of our human’s instincts. In the Temperament Mediated Perception Diagram below, the beginning of that meaningful influence is represented by the Dominance Threshold in the top portion of the diagram. The Threshold of Enlightenment Diagram below further illustrates that point.
A Call to Action
This essay is intended to alert your sense of patriotism. I am arguing here that those around us who insist on their “God-given right” to pollute our environment, endanger our “Domestic Tranquility,” deprive us of self-determination and steel our ability to participate in self-government are not ethical citizens. If they think it is okay, their judgment is not to be trusted.
Perhaps the most useful tool offered by society for our spiritual progression is the cooperative community. The act of preparing our thoughts to express a personal opinion serves to better align our conscious-unconscious mind interaction with the actual nature of reality. When we hear someone express their thoughts, we compare what is in our worldview with what they are expressing. By doing so, we gain a sense of the reasonableness of what we think is true. In effect, we teach so that we can be taught.
In view of the cooperative community concept, it is important that we provide candid feedback to others in our community. Here, candid must always be tempered by fairness and compassion. Our words are powerful, and it is for us to choose them with care so as not to hurt our fellow citizens.
Even so, it is important that we do provide clear feedback. If someone’s actions contradict our sense of community, it is important that we say so, kindly, but clearly. Remaining silent only tells them that their actions are acceptable. Social norms are negotiated with social feedback.
In this way, this essay is intended to inform you about the way some people are acting out their human’s instincts to dominate at the expense of others. I refer to them as conservatives because that is the banner they fly. I refer to them as radical because they are on the fringe of the usually moderate conservative community.
Radical Conservatism
I wrote this essay because of the following National Public Radio (NPR) news item. It was shocking to me that the Republican being interviewed saw nothing wrong with interfering in the Democrat’s primary. The person’s support of the Tea Party served to confirm to me that she is a radical conservative and part of the growing danger to our democracy.
February 23, 2020, just days before the South Carolina Democratic primary, NPR host Michel Martin, had a most disturbing news item titled South Carolina Primary Lookahead. The second part of the item was an interview that began with Michel Martin saying:
“And we’re going to stay in South Carolina for a moment to check in on something going on on the Republican side of the aisle. As we just mentioned, the Republican primary has been canceled this year. But a group of GOP activists calling themselves Trump 229 decided that wasn’t enough to give President Trump a leg up to cross party lines and vote in next week’s Democratic primary for Senator Bernie Sanders. Why? They think it will help President Trump to run against somebody with what they call extremely socialist views.
“Karen Martin is one of the founders of Trump 229. She’s also the organizer of the Spartanburg Tea Party, and she is with us now. Karen Martin thank you so much for joining us.”
South Carolina’s Republican Primary had been canceled because Trump is an incumbent running for his second term. The state has an open primary, meaning that any registered voter can vote for anyone on the ballot. That means the Republicans were free to cause trouble for the Democrats by voting for the candidate they think Trump can beat, in this case, Bernie Sanders.
The first major point of the interview is that, via the Trump 229 movement, South Carolinian Karen Martin was telling fellow conservatives to participate in the Democrat’s primary and vote for Sanders. During the interview, she insisted it was legal and intended to show the need to have closed primaries.
Host: “I understand that the purpose of this is twofold. First, you think Bernie Sanders would be the president’s weakest opponent. But you’re also pushing for a closed primary, which is to say the only people who can vote in the primary are those holding the primary, which is obviously not the case now. Why is that a priority for you?”
Martin: “…It’s important to me as an individual voter because anytime that someone who supports a Democrat platform is able to cross over and vote in a Republican primary, that dilutes my vote. I think that the primaries are actually – they’re not an election. They’re for offering up a nominee to run in a general election against nominees of other parties.”
Host: “…There’s another campaign in South Carolina called Operation Chaos 2020, which is also encouraging Republican voters to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary. But here’s my question. I mean, if your candidate is so strong, why do you have to cheat to help him win? I mean, isn’t that like Tonya Harding’s husband kneecapping Nancy Kerrigan? I mean, why not fight fair and let the chips fall where they may?”
MARTIN: “We’re absolutely fighting fair, and that’s our point. In the rules of South Carolina politics, it is OK, perfectly acceptable, not cheating to go vote in other parties’ primary. So we’re working within the rules to bring about a change those rules that we don’t like.”
The second point made by the host was that Karen Martin was acting in a manner that supports the Russian efforts to get Trump reelected by interfering with the Democrat’s election.
Host: “All the experts we’ve talked to … say that this is kind of the whole purpose of Russian election interference….
“Now, I assume that you believe yourself to be a patriot. I mean, that’s in part why you started getting involved in the Tea Party. Why would you participate in something that is exactly what the Russians would have you do, which is exactly their agenda as well, which is to compromise people’s confidence that the system’s fair?”
Here, Karen Martin ignored the Host’s point about the Russians by repeating how she thought her group was demonstrating the need for a closed primary.
Trump also urged his followers to vote for Sanders in the South Carolina Democratic primary. The report I found indicated that 5% of Republican voters did vote in the Democratic primary, presumably for Saunders.
Scorched-Earth Politics
As a usually casual observer of politics, I have noted the differences between what conservatives consider good governance and the way liberals approach government. I have learned that we cannot depend on the political party affiliation to tell conservative from liberal, as policies tend to be situational. To be sure we are on the same page, here are the definitions I use:
Conservative: a person who will act to protect the status quo from change; politically, religiously and economically righteous; often mistakes ideology as truth; seldom moved by arguments for the greater good. Potentially combative. Guiding phrases: State’s rights, Second Amendment, capitalism, religious freedom, right to life, poverty is a failure of personal responsibility. Spiritual expression: Belief in the supremacy of a Supreme Being as explained by religious leaders.
Liberal: a person who will test the status quo with new ideas; may be religious but places personal responsibility above religious doctrine; understands the need for compromise and social moderation; recognizes the importance of individual wellbeing and the role the community must play to assure the safety of the individual. Guiding phrases: “we are all in this together,” compassion, sharing, balance, global (one planet-one people), the greater good. Spiritual expression: Recognition of the spark of divinity in all life and the unity of humanity.
I was in the Air Force with a very likable but aggressive fellow that always made me a little nervous. I explained the difference between him and me like this: He would stand behind someone and playfully hold a glass of beer above the person’s head, threatening to pour it on the person. The difference between him and me was that he would pour the beer … did on a few occasions. I would not.
I do not know but I will wager he is a radical conservative today. This is important. Conservatives are gun rights people, and like that glass of beer, they at least seem to be a lot more willing to use them than are liberals. Never underestimate them.
Tea Party
For me, the Republican party turned into a cult with the creation of the contemporary Tea Party and Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. The Tea Party was all about smaller government and balancing the budget. But consider this from How Trump Exposed the Tea Party,
“The success of Trump’s campaign has, if nothing else, exposed the Tea Party for what it really is; Trump’s popularity is, in effect, final proof of what some of us have been arguing for years: that the Tea Party is less a libertarian movement than a right-wing version of populism. Think William Jennings Bryan or Huey Long, not Ayn Rand. Tea Partiers are less upset about the size of government overall than they are that so much of it is going to other people, especially immigrants and nonwhites. They are for government for them and against government for Not-Them.”
Contract with America
In 1994, Newt Gingrich came up with the idea to have Republican lawmakers sign a promise to support a ten-point contract intended to further the conservative agenda. As I remember, most did and those who did not or who violated the agreement paid a heavy political price. The following Contract With America is from The Republican “Contract with America” (1994)
How I understand the implication of each item is in blue.
- The Fiscal Responsibility Act:
A balanced budget/tax limitation amendment and a legislative line-item veto to restore fiscal responsibility to an out-of-control Congress, requiring them to live under the same budget constraints as families and businesses.
This became a balance the Federal budget under the same rules for balancing a household budget. Under this rule, extraordinary expenses because of national emergencies would not be covered without debate. As I remember how this rule was used, after the tax cuts for corporations, a balanced budget meant that there would be no funding for social, safety net programs. In other words, conservatives consider safety net programs, including Social Security which we pay into, government giveaways.
- The Taking Back Our Streets Act:
An anti-crime package including stronger truth-in-sentencing, “good faith” exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer’s “crime” bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools.
It has become clear that incarceration tends to harden criminals. Prisons are also used under the social conservative agenda to house mentally ill people. The more compassionate and humane approach is to find ways to reduce the reasons people end up in jail and to care for people needing treatment as part of our responsibility to fellow citizens.
- The Personal Responsibility Act:
Discourage illegitimacy and teen pregnancy by prohibiting welfare to minor mothers and denying increased AFDC for additional children while on welfare, cut spending for welfare programs, and enact a tough two-years-and-out provision with work requirements to promote individual responsibility.
The strong religious influence on the conservative agenda makes this “God wants you to abstain, and if not, God demands that you suffer the consequences even in rape, incest and youthful indiscretion.” This is not my field of education, but it seems that the social dynamics predestine some young people to stumble into parenthood. The solution is not to beat them with a big federal stick, but to help educate, prevent and reduce poverty.
From The Contract with America: Implementing New Ideas in the U.S., here is one of the objectives of Act 3 according to the conservative Heritage Foundation:
“The Personal Responsibility Act 3 of the Contract sought to fundamentally revamp the role of the state in welfare policy by developing policies to reduce teenage pregnancies and illegitimate births by prohibiting aid to mothers under 18 who give birth out of wedlock and requiring them to name the fathers of their children, who would be held accountable for their actions. Such women would be required to live at home to receive any aid and would not get housing subsidies to set up their own apartments. The Act also required that aid be cut off if recipients did not work.”
- The Family Reinforcement Act:
Child support enforcement, tax incentives for adoption, strengthening rights of parents in their children’s education, stronger child pornography laws, and an elderly dependent care tax credit to reinforce the central role of families in American society.
All a good idea except, as I remember, this policy was intended to allow the government to abandon safety net social services because religions and families were supposed to take care of their own.
- The American Dream Restoration Act:
A $500 per child tax credit, begin repeal of the marriage tax penalty, and creation of American Dream Savings Accounts to provide middle-class tax relief.
This is Federally imposed enforcement of man-woman marriage. The retirement savings account is a good idea, but as I remember, it was also used as an excuse to cut Social Security. This is based on the conservative assumption that everyone has the same capabilities and opportunities for personal responsibility.
- The National Security Restoration Act:
No U.S. troops under U.N. command and restoration of the essential parts of our national security funding to strengthen our national defense and maintain our credibility around the world.
It is not just Trump who does not like the United Nations. The fact is that by contributing troops to UN-run police actions, we are able to share responsibility with many other countries. Being the leader is not the same as having a strong advisory role. The Conservative urge for nationalism is the beginning of isolationism, which is illogical when trying to deal with global markets, terrorists and climate change.
- The Senior Citizens Fairness Act:
Raise the Social Security earnings limit which currently forces seniors out of the workforce, repeal the 1993 tax hikes on Social Security benefits and provide tax incentives for private long-term care insurance to let Older Americans keep more of what they have earned over the years.
As a senior citizen, this sounds good to me but it was used to force workers to work longer before being able to draw Social Security.
- The Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act:
Small business incentives, capital gains cut and indexation, neutral cost recovery, risk assessment/cost-benefit analysis, strengthening the Regulatory Flexibility Act and unfunded mandate reform to create jobs and raise worker wages.
Like many of these, this sounds good on the surface but then we see how parts of it have been implemented. Conservatives hate regulations that impose rules on capitalism and local government. Capitalism has no incentive to self-regulate. The fact is that, without rules to protect customers and the environment, businesses will find the “most cost-effective” solution, all else be damned.
The conservative approach to job creation is like a feudal system in which the lords are made strong so that they can support many serfs. Remember the line in the song, 16 Tons: “I sold my soul to the company store”? I think that is a real thing, such “stuck in a job” situations have just been updated.
- The Common Sense Legal Reform Act:
“Loser pays” laws, reasonable limits on punitive damages and reform of product liability laws to stem the endless tide of litigation.
The legal system favors those with money and power. For instance, the strong can offer substantial settlements but require nondisclosure agreements that effectively prevent warning future potential victims. This enables continued bad behavior on the part of the powerful person or company. In the relatively rare instances in which grievances go to trial, the conservative estimate of “reasonable punitive damage awards” is likely chump change to the corporation. It may be cheaper to gamble that there will be no complaints, but if there are, that they will be cheaply silenced. Having to pay a limited liability court settlement is probably a gift to the company considering to potential profit in wrongdoing.
- The Citizen Legislature Act:
A first-ever vote on term limits to replace career politicians with citizen legislators.
I am inclined to think this is a good idea. Not having term limits mean our Senators and Representatives tend to get pretty old while in office and amass considerable political power. If they are corrupt, they get really good at it. (If they help society, then yes, they get good at that as well.)
It also bothers me that older people are controlling the fate of our country. Ronald Reagan was known to show early signs of senility while still in office. He was 69 when elected to his first term. The two leading contenders for the 2020 presidential election are Bernie Sanders at 78 (he will be 86 at the end of his second term) and Joe Biden at 77 (he will be 85 at the end of his second term).
I am 76, mentally healthy with a reasonably high IQ, yet I am aware that I am not as mentally acute as in my younger years. Watching interviews of the candidates gives us subtle hints of their mental acuity. The strongest mind of the lot was Pete Buttigieg at 38. (In all ways, I preferred Mayor Pete over the rest but will support whoever goes against Trump.)
As I understand the intention of this Item, it needs to be a plank on the Democratic platform as well.
The contract highlighted the influence of religion on conservative’s sense of good governance. In reality, it was an instrument for social engineering that sought to preempt personal responsibility by dictating proper personal responsibility using government money as the stick.
Conservative Gain Dominance by Suppressing Voter Rights
Voter suppression is clearly unconstitutional, unethical and undemocratic. Nevertheless, probably since the country’s founding, it has been a common practice for a political party to find ways to keep people in opposing political parties from voting. Today, it is predominantly conservatives who are seeking to keep liberals from voting. As soon as a law is passed to stop one approach to voter suppression, conservatives come up with a new approach. From Five Acts of Voter Suppression That Will Sway the Next Election:
“When people talk about Trump being a “fascist” or American democracy being eroded, they are often criticized for hyperbole. But this does describe an America where a minority of the population are able to remain in power despite winning fewer votes in elections, and are then able to appoint judges who perpetuate that imbalance. It becomes a country disproportionally represented by white politicians, elected primarily by white voters with disproportionate voting power.”
Blocking Good Governance to Make the Democratic Party Seem Like a Failure
Conservatives are always looking to the next election for more power. This is evident by the way Republicans do all they can to keep Democrats from appearing to be successful lawmakers. As discussed in McConnell Promised to End Senate Gridlock. Instead, Republicans Are Stuck in Neutral, the Republicans are currently refusing to even debate bills passed to them from the House. Instead, with their majority, they are doing Trump’s bidding and confirming as many conservative judges as possible. From The Republican Party versus democracy:
“Today’s Republicans aren’t ideologically opposed to democracy in the way that, say, fascists and Islamists are. It’s that they care more about power than they do about basic democratic principles and are willing to run roughshod over the latter if it helps them win the former. This Republican attitude is more democracy-indifferent than anti-democratic, reflecting a party so caught up in partisan combat that it can’t recognize the authoritarian road it’s traveling down.”
Stacking the Courts
In a very real way, conservatives are taking over the country by dominating the judicial system. They are doing this by cheating the norms of fair politics. For instance, from President Trump Has Stacked the Courts With Conservative Judges:
“For observers of the U.S. judiciary, the conservative support of Kavanaugh at all costs was no surprise. Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court — and the celebration by Republicans that followed — was the culmination of a decades-long conservative project. The project neared completion in 2016, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to allow Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat to be filled during an election year, a decision credited with bringing Trump-skeptic Republicans “home” in the 2016 election. It came a step closer on April 7, 2017, when conservative judge Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to what Democrats see as the “stolen” seat. And with the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, it was done. The Supreme Court is now considered to be the most conservative it has been since the mid-1930s.”
The confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court was just the tip of the iceberg. The conservatives virtually own the Supreme Court and much of the lower courts for years to come. While judges are supposed to uphold the law and the Constitution, the actual practice is to turn the country toward conservative values at the cost of human rights and fairness to less entitled citizens. From What Trump has done to the courts, explained:
“Judges, by contrast, have become the most consequential policymakers in the nation. They have gutted America’s campaign finance law and dismantled much of the Voting Rights Act. They have allowed states to deny health coverage to millions of Americans. They’ve held that religion can be wielded as a sword to cut away the rights of others. They’ve drastically watered down the federal ban on sexual harassment. And that barely scratches the surface.”
And
“And that’s not all. In the coming months, the courts are poised to gut abortion rights, eviscerate gun control, and neuter landmark environmental laws. Federal judges have already stripped workers of their ability to assert many of their rights against their employers, and this process is likely to accelerate in the near future. Many of our voting rights lay in tatters, thanks to conservative judicial appointments, and this process is likely to accelerate as well.”
Beginning of the End of Democratic Governance
There can be no doubt that the United States is drifting toward a government for the elite rather than for the people. To capitalists, citizens have always been consumers, but the government usually responded to citizen’s needs with at least some regulation of excessive capitalist misconduct. See The One Percent. (Graph is from the video Wealth Inequality in America.)
We are a law-based society. Laws are intended to assure a peaceful society for every citizen. Laws are a form of social regulation. While we have laws to protect the weak from the strong, we also have laws specifically intended to protect citizens from abusive corporations.
It appears that, to conservatives, laws are best that serve the religious and the powerful. I do not intend this in an ideological way. Demonstrated conservative behavior has shown that they feel it is fine to subjugate the weak in favor of religious and political ideologies. Conservatives hate regulation of business. Yet, those regulations exist because past capitalist behavior has shown that, without regulation, consumers and the environment have no protection.
According to Paul Teske, dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado, Denver, in the History channel’s 2018 The 1994 Midterms: When Newt Gingrich Helped Republicans Win Big:
“The Gingrich approach of extreme right ideas, combined with a scorched-earth personal level of politics in attacking opponents—later seen in Clinton’s investigations and impeachment—has also had a major impact on American politics” he says. “It helped bring a much more ‘win at all costs’ mentality, and a divisiveness that persists today.”
“Win at all cost” is the attitude demonstrated by Karen Martin in the NPR interview I quoted from at the top of this essay.
Legitimacy
The conservatives were very clever when the voting districts in the USA were drawn up based on the 2010 census. They arranged the districts so that Democrats needed to win a very large majority in some districts in order to be declared the winner. The net result was that the Democrats won the popular vote in 2016 but lost the presidency. Senate and House votes were also biased.
The vote was also biased by Russian propaganda that, even today, has made many Americans believe outlandish conspiracies that favor conservative ideals.
As a practical question of legitimate government, the current president, vice president–possibly some of the Senators and Representatives–arguably would not have been elected had the vote not been manipulated by the conservatives to defeat the democratic elections.
If we had a “do-over” with fair voting districts and no Russian interference, if the Senate did not stonewall President Obama’s Supreme Court pick, would we have a different government today?
From The US Government is Officially Illegitimate:
“The GOP has made it clear with its actions since Newt Gingrich declared war on the Democratic Party that its main goal is power, not governance.”
Know Thyself
Conservatives would call me a liberal, but I think of myself as a pragmatically rational humanist. That is my temperament. It shows up in my writing and the way I work with all things paranormal. That is why I became an engineer. Another way of describing my point of view is that reasonableness should be the heaviest weight on the scale.
The measure of a person is not financial or social success. It is the degree to which a person has learned to balance the lifetime requirement to live a good life with the spiritual requirement to seek understanding. Understanding turns us more toward humanitarian decisions. The most important secret of the mystery schools is the middle way.
We are driven by our human’s instinct to dominate so as to assure the supremacy of its gene pool. Not one of us still in the flesh escapes that imperative. Only a few of us realize this and have consciously turned toward our spiritual urge to gain understanding, even as we actively engage in this lifetime.
From the perspective of political spirituality, being a liberal means being a humanist first and letting concern for the greater good guide our decisions. That is an expansive approach to living that exposes us to often unexpected opportunities to gain understanding. As a practical matter, liberals at least unconsciously understand the idea of sharing this world and that we must succeed together or not at all.
Compared to liberals, conservatives seem to be more insular and dogmatic. It is as if liberals love camping with Mother Nature while conservatives prefer having a solid wall around them with a really strong door. What are they keeping out? Everything they can imagine.
The 2018 Business Insider article by Hilary Brueck, “These key psychological differences can determine whether you’re liberal or conservative,” includes an interesting list of comparisons between liberal and conservative ways of thinking. Under the heading of “Being scared can make you more conservative” is the statement, “Decades of research have shown that people get more conservative when they feel threatened and afraid.”
Conservatives will insist that I am unjustly attacking them; calling them names with psychobabble but consider their life choices. Guns are made for the single purpose of killing. Even competition shooting and target practice is training for killing or a demonstration of the ability to kill.
Here in the USA, our workforce is shrinking, making it necessary to welcome more immigrants for our unfilled jobs, yet conservatives do everything they can to keep strangers out of our country. That is a response born of fear of “others.”
Racist groups here in the USA are almost always linked to conservative ideals. That is another “other” fear response.
The conservative anti-regulation and blind support of capitalism is consistent with their climate change denial. That is a “Let someone else sacrifice their gene pool for me” response to danger. The only way we are going to reverse the warming is to change the way we have been living and that means changing the way we do business by using regulations to support what helps and suppress what does harm. Apparently, conservatives would rather drive us all into climate-induced oblivion.
My apologies to the businessperson who is put out of business by climate change regulations. If the regulation is written fairly, the businesses causing the most trouble are the ones who will be forced to stop causing trouble. If you burn coal, then in today’s reality, you should have the sense of sharing necessary to stop burning coal.
Put another way, people in my town burning wood under cover of the “Green Burn Code” are causing polluted air for all of us. My right to breathe is not trumped by their right to burn wood! A law stopping them from burning wood would not be denying them a right. It would be stopping them from abusing other people’s need to breathe clean air. Sharing our world means I willingly support green power plants so that they do not need to burn wood.
My intention here is not to bash conservatives. It is to make sure you understand the difference between conservative and liberal thinking. It is important that you decide which you are. My hope is that, if you are conservative, you will understand liberal’s grievances. If you are liberal, perhaps it is time to let your conservative friends know that it is not okay to win at any cost.
Compromise
The most powerful tool citizens have for community building is compromise. In fact, none of us know for sure about anything. Even if the information we base our opinion on is not flawed, it is likely our worldview has been contaminated by cultural norms that, themselves, are based on flawed information. This is the seeker’s view, it is the engineer’s view and it is the attitude that opens doors to new understanding … and a more healthy community.
Compromise is the most obvious fatality of the scorched earth, win at any cost approach to governance adopted by the conservative lawmakers.
Finding a Better Way
This is a time of political, social and environmental crisis.
When controlled by our human’s instincts alone, we will bow down to the most powerful of our species hoping to assure a place for its offspring near the throne. At least, we will do all we can to assure our human’s offspring’s survival as we understand the dangers.
Ignorance Vortex: Disbelief > Ignored Evidence > Resulting Lack of Research > Only Encounter Antidotal Evidence > Disbelief.
