What do you think?

I’ve been hearing that old saw, we pissed off the conservatives and the liberals (or whatever the issue is) in equal numbers, so we must have been doing it right, for the past thirty years, and I think it’s a crock of shit. Surely on some issues the conservatives are more correct and on some others the liberals are, honing your message so that it always goes smack dab through the middle, it’s just stupid.

I’m not saying that presenting both sides of a story is wrong, there is no point in only telling one side, but presenting them with equal weight, as if they are both equal, that doesn’t sound right. Presenting Jenny McCarthy, low level tv star and prominent anti vaxxer, and some high muckety muck in the medical profession as both having opinions that are equal is crazy.

Always aiming to get into the exact middle of any controversy is as biased as siding with either one, don’t you think?

I don’t buy your classification of living beyond their means being a liberal credo. How about the republicans always wanting to cut taxes so that services can’t be paid for? How about all those tax cuts that could have been going to pay the national debt?

Hey how about this? I am doing my laundry this morning and there is a little shelf where people leave books and magazines for others to pick up, and I had two more minutes till my washer was done so I picked up a book, Trespass by Fletcher Knebel, and right there on the page before the book began was:

Get off the estate.

What for?

Because it’s mine.

Where did you get it?

From my father.

Where did he get it?

From his father.

And where did he get it?

He fought for it.

Well, I’ll fight you for it.

Carl Sandburg, The People Yes

I think you had it as two Irishmen fighting, but maybe in Carl’s poem it was two Irishmen, or maybe Carl got it from his Irish Grandma, or whatever, these things get around.

I don’t know what definition you are using for socialist when you say that all govs are socialist. It’s not the one that most people use. Well it’s kind of the conservative definition of socialist as anything they don’t like. Like when you don’t like the way your hypothetical wife cooked the eggs on a particular morning and you call them socialist, or when she shows you her new dress that you don’t like so you call that socialist.

But I am going to agree on you about how we get wiser as we age, and by we of course I mean us, not them. No, really as people grow their opinions change, mainly I think you get disillusioned and realize everything is more complicated than it seemed in the glow of your youth. Maybe half of us, maybe two thirds are like that, and the rest of us just form opinions somewhere about the age of twenty one and just stick with them the rest of our lives.

I think you’ll agree that a lot of people don’t like to think about things, and I think that’s because the more you think about things, the less sure you are about what you believe, and most people find that unpleasant so it’s best just to stick with what you think you know.

What do you think?