A Response to All Regarding “A Letter to Liberals”

My last post received more than the usual amount of attention, and that’s putting it mildly. (Website traffic was the second highest it’s ever been, topped only by a post I wrote last year which questioned Oprah Winfrey’s motives in donating to a Stockton, CA candidate.)  Comments, too, have rarely been higher. My site gathered over 150, and the various Facebook trails easily topped another 500 or more.

I tried to keep up with them, really I did. But it was just too much. So instead I offer this post as a response to all who took the time to read and reply.

First, a bit of summary: my previous post was an open letter from a fictional narrator (let’s call him “John”) who has a basic middle-class life with generally conservative, bullet-point political beliefs, none of which are all that strong. He spends most of his time living life rather than breathing politics—as most of us do. He describes himself, first in purely personal terms, and then in terms that are increasingly conservative, and he asks whether the liberals out there hate him. (I also want to add that John’s beliefs are NOT mine; a number of responses asked about that—several even calling me cowardly for “hiding” behind a fiction. My answer is to read more of what’s on my site; my positions are well-known and very public.)

The point of the post was not to discuss John’s political leanings; it’s pretty obvious that most on the left would disagree with much of what he says. The point, rather, was for each of us to ask ourselves whether, as we learn more about someone’s political beliefs, we’re that much more likely to pigeonhole them (or, worse, demonize and dehumanize them), allowing that small part of their lives to color how we react.

And it seems, based on the responses received, that we do.

Using a variety of semantic techniques (in which I’m well-versed) I took the time to manually analyze the 166 responses on my web site in order to categorize what people said.  Here’s the chart:

First thing to note: A sizeable chunk of commenters—about 1 in 5—spent their energy disputing the specific points delineated in the narrator’s world view; many, it seems, thought they were actually talking to me rather than a fictional character.  It was interesting to see where these people got to before they became a little bit heated in their responses. Frankly, it was much as I expected: people were fine with “John” until he hit one of several hot buttons: for some they “were fine with you right up until you said you voted for Bush twice,” or they “just didn’t understand why you think we’re trying to take your guns away.” For others it was religion and still others abortions.  A few people even went point for point.  Most, though, remained largely civil… largely, but not always.

Then there were the 5% of responses that clearly and succinctly confirmed their hatred for the narrator, offering up some choice tidbits in doing so:

“Yeah, you're hated. You're too lazy to think.”

 “Yes, I do. You're scum. It's because of you and millions of dumbasses just like you that the country's as fucked as it is right now. Fuck off and die.”

More interesting to me, though was the “almost hatred,” the collection of people who couldn’t come right out and say it (perhaps because they don’t like to think of themselves as people who would hate), but who have absolutely no problem pitying the narrator, or feeling for sorry for him, or just straight out insulting him… as if that somehow makes it okay. I call these people the “No, buts” (as in, “No, I don’t hate you, but….”), and there were quite a few of them who said things like these:

“I…do not hate you but I don't hold your views. You and your wife sound like sheep led blindly by the [R]epublican party.”

That was one of the nice ones. Try these on instead.

“Of course I don't hate you. But I do think that you're a bit of an idiot who holds opinions he's not willing to think about for more than a minute at a time.”

“To answer your question, "Do I hate you?" the answer is that I disparage and disdain you for your complacency, ignorance, lack of foresight, and lack of empathy. But you are just too insignificant by yourself to be worthy of full-fledged hatred. I reserve that for the scoundrels who have taken you in.”

Oh, but thanks for not "hating…."

A nice chunk of the commenters—about a third—were civil and engaging on the general topic, and chose not to bullet-point their responses. To these people I say “thanks.”

My favorites, though, were the small group of people who really took the time to examine their own responses, who saw the point I was trying to make, and who suppressed their limbic brains long enough to take a look at themselves:

“Manufactured divisiveness is the problem. Oneness is the solution.”

“[The post] was meant to get readers to consider why they think all Republicans fit into that mold. Because they don't. And to get readers to realize that all of us Liberals don't fit into the mold that Republicans try to squeeze us into either. Doesn't anyone take the time to read all the way to the end anymore?”

It seems to me that many do read all the way to the end. But they don’t necessarily wait until the end to make up their minds….

(A side note of thanks to the few who made me laugh, especially the guy who said that he didn’t hate the narrator until he found out that he, the narrator, was a Penguins fan…)

Semi-finally, I want to point out three sites that were referred to along the way; two are direct responses to “John’s” letter, and the third is a wonderful cartoon strip that sums things up quite nicely. From Deborah Winter-Blood comes this one, and from Philip H. comes this one. The third, from the site Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal is here. All are very much on point and interesting to read.

And finally finally, let’s all just ask ourselves honestly and truthfully: Where on this chart did we end up? And where do we want to be?

Michael (the real, non-fictional person) Charney

A Letter to Liberals...

Hi.

I wanted to take a few moments to introduce myself.  I live just outside of Pittsburgh, in a single-family home along with my wife and two children, both girls. My daughters’ names are Katie, she’s nine years old, and Chrissy, who’s twelve (though Chrissy, now a tweenager, is starting to prefer Christine, or just Chris, because she says that “Chrissy” makes it sound like she’s still a toddler.)

Our house is simple, a bungalow with three bedrooms and one-and-a-half bathrooms--and a mortgage that can make things a little tight for us now and then. There’s an eat-in kitchen, a nice living room (and, yes, I splurged on a wide screen HDTV that hangs on the wall over the fireplace). Built in the ‘20s, the place needs a bit of work now and then, but nothing I can’t handle, though I imagine in a couple of years I’ll need to spring for a new roof.

Do you hate me? At all?

I work in Human Resources for a company that makes corrugated cardboard boxes. We have about ninety employees and we pay a decent wage and have been able to avoid unionizing. A family-owned company, we’ve managed to instill that family feeling across the board, and our owner, the grandson of the founder, feels that if you just treat people fairly, you don’t need to deal with what he calls “that union stuff.”  I mostly agree with him. I know unions are good for worker safety and things like that, but mostly I think they aren’t needed as much these days, and just kind of get in the way of things.  My wife doesn’t work, but she knows she can if she wants to, especially now that the kids are a little older.

Do you hate me? Even a little bit?

As a family we’re somewhat religious. My wife was raised Presbyterian; I was raised in a Charismatic church, which I left as a teenager (over my parents’ very strong objections). I find the Presbyterian church comfortable, and the four of us go most Sundays. The church tends to the conservative, with conventional sermons on morality and ethics. The sermons aren’t usually about really sensitive issues like, say abortion, but it’s generally accepted that the church is against it, even though, well, like everything, there probably should be some exceptions. And with gay marriage, well, we’re not sure. It somehow feels wrong, but then I’m sure God loves them, too. It’s a good church with a good pastor. We like it.

Do you hate me? Perhaps silently?

We’re a Republican family, and both my wife and I have voted Republican for as long as I can remember (including both times for George W. Bush). Though we both think the Republican Party should do more to reach out to poor people and minorities like it did way back when, we’re also strong believers in people picking themselves up by their own bootstraps and not counting on government to support them all the time. Plus, I do feel the bite of those taxes every other week when I get my paycheck, and it hurts. Taxes should be lower.  I’m also not happy with being forced to buy insurance if I don’t want it or think I need it, and I don’t like the fact that people don’t seem to respect the Constitution much anymore, like how they want to take away guns from honest, law-following people.

I’m also not real sure if I like the idea that people who have come here illegally should get to stay. I know there’s no simple answer, but it just doesn’t feel right to me.

How about now? Am I a Rethuglican to you? Or a Teahadist? Or a Teabagger? Am I someone you feel pity for? Someone you wish didn’t exist?

Actually, I don’t think about politics all that much, and when I think about myself and my wife and my family, it’s not “We’re Republicans,” or “We’re Conservatives.”  Mostly I think about how we’re a family, and about how I want my girls to get good grades so they can get ahead, and how I want them to respect others and God. I think about doing a good job and loving my wife and kids, and I think about my friends and whether Tom and Jack will ever agree on who makes the best barbecued ribs. Oh, and I think about the Steelers and the Penguins, but not so much about the Pirates. I’m a husband and a father and a sports fan and a hard worker and a good friend. And sometimes, when someone wants to talk about politics, or when an election comes around, I’m a Republican.

I’m really not that different from you, am I?

So why do you hate me?

[Note to my readers: the above "biography" is fictional, and is not my personal story. I chose this mode to personalize my point for each of us. To paraphrase Suze Orman: People First, then Politics, then Things....]

Our Funding Fathers

I’ve come to the conclusion that Citizens United is much ado about nothing; the real culprit is Buckley v Valeo.

Buckley v Valeo was a squabble over the Federal Elections Campaign Act of 1971, which both limited various kinds of campaign spending and financing, and established the Federal Election Commission (FEC) as the body responsible for oversight. Five years later the case wound its way up to the Supreme Court which ruled, in a per curiam decision (meaning the court’s decision is rendered collectively and anonymously) that certain provisions of FECA71 were unconstitutional. Per Wikipedia, “the limitations on campaign expenditures, on independent expenditures by individuals and groups, and on expenditures by a candidate from personal funds were struck down.”

The decision is famously interpreted to mean that money equals speech.  It remains so to this day (despite Justice Stevens comment in Nixon v. Shrink Missouri Government PAC, where he said that “[m]oney is property, not speech.”)

And from there it’s been all downhill. For a sense of where we’ve come since those Nixonian days, check out this video:

It was Robert C. Byrd, former West Virginia Senator, who said that it “is money, money, money! Not ideas, not principles, but money that reigns supreme in American politics.” And it was Phil Gramm, another Senator (this time from Texas), who reminds us—all too sadly—that those looking to serve the public as elected officials should “have the most reliable friend you can have in American politics, and that is ready money.”

And ready it is. In recent years alone we’ve seen the dramatic and corrupting influx of money in politics from the likes of Sheldon Adelson, George Soros, the Koch Brothers, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Vincent Ryan, not to mention the NEA, Goldman Sachs, the NRA, and the AFL-CIO. It’s gotten so bad that we need scorecards to keep track. And all of these people get to “talk” with their money. The First Amendment (and the SCOTUS responsible for Buckley v Valeo) says so. But those famous names and acronymic organizations obviously have “voices” that are exponentially louder than ours…

But is money really speech? Is that a core First Amendment principle that stands staunchly in the face of all assaults?

Apparently not.

In this compelling Virginia Law Review article, the case is made that “[a]s any first-year law student knows, a helpful way to test the rule a court might offer to govern a case is to see whether one is also comfortable extending that rule to a relevantly similar case.”  So if, they argue, it’s okay to contribute to Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians and Greens, is it then okay to donate to, say, the American Nazi Party? Or the Communist Party? Or any party that promotes ideals and methods antithetical to the general interests of the society at large?

Well, all of that seems to be okay. But what about donating, for example, to Al-Qaida? “On the one hand,” the article points out, “if a contribution is speech, then it is speech no matter to whom the contribution is made. But on the other hand, this looks a lot like the support of terrorism.”  Well, you might say, that makes sense. It’s obvious. You can’t aid and abet criminal activity. That’s nothing new. It’s a pretty clear line.

But isn’t that what we’re doing when we allow a few individuals to so corrupt our political system with their “speech” that the rest of us can’t ever be heard above the din? What is so different about allowing large donations to be used in support of gaming Wall Street, or promoting foreclosures, or offshoring jobs. What is so different about allowing a flood of money to be used in the effort to poison our aquifers and delay the building of infrastructure and protecting high-powered weaponry (both governmental and civil)? You might argue that one is quite literally blowing things up, while the others do so only metaphorically. Well I beg to differ. One method is just faster.

So why is all of that okay?

Ahh… wait, I forgot.  All of those things aren’t criminal activities, are they? They are insanely legal activities, because what money in politics is really being used for is to make morally criminal activities legal. And so we have Ouroboros eating its own tail: the money and the beast are the same.

We have only the one choice: voices. Real voices, not the printed kind that folds up in your wallet and sports dead presidents. Real voices from real people, gathered together and getting louder and louder until, finally, something is done. We have only the one choice. So spend your time. Spend your energy. Ultimately these are more powerful currencies than what they have to spend, no matter how much it is.

We Have Met the Enemy, and he is….

Over this last week we’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly Americans. All have been on bright, unavoidable display. Consider:

A couple of very bad Americans committed a heinous crime. Despite the amateurish execution of a poorly designed plan, they managed to kill several innocent people and injure scores of others. Smoke and flames rose; fragments penetrated skin and bone. Some lost limbs. Others will remain traumatized for a very long time. And an American tradition is now forever scarred.

Immediately, though, many, many good Americans—thousands, it seems, if not more—expressed first their shock and dismay, and then their support, in response to the events in Boston. People are donating to the man whose now-damaged boat served as an unsuccessful hideout; first-responders are rightfully having their moment in the limelight; even New Yorkers put aside their love/hate relationship with Beantown in a touching moment at Yankee stadium—one the most hardcore fans on both sides of that rivalry could never have imagined.

But then the ugly Americans came out, emerging from all the usual places. Journalists on CNN forgot what their job titles mean and spread scurrilous rumors and false information. Elected officials rapidly fashioned brand-new bully pulpits in order to use the tragedy to deliver self-serving, ideological messages. Conspiracy theorists, living as they do in a surreal, Dali-esque world where nothing is ever as it seems, have elevated the hash tag #falseflag back to the top of the Twitter charts, broadcasting their beliefs in a government conspiracy 140 characters at a time.

And underpinning it all: the definition of the word “enemy.”

There is no question that Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev are our enemies. They fashioned an act of terror, one designed (we're assuming) to deliver an ideological message and an equally ideological response. But so, too, is Timothy McVeigh our enemy, who’s bombing of the Murrah building in Oklahoma City served the same purpose even though the message was different. And so, too, is James Holmes, he of the midnight movie shootings, and Eric Rudoloph, the Olympic Park bomber, and Steven Spader who, along with two accomplices, brutally macheted a family in Mont Vernon, NH for no reason other than to see what it felt like to kill. These are all our enemies, all people who would terrorize us, who have terrorized us. 

Ahh… but times are different now.

Now is a time when some want to reclassify people who believe different things than we do, particularly if those different things have anything at all to do with a religion we don’t much like. Many are now crying out for the surviving Tsarnaev brother—an American citizen—to be classified as an enemy combatant, a status that would essentially suspend all of his civil rights.  Fortunately, the White House declined to do so, recognizing—rightfully, in my opinion, that Tsarnaev is a criminal.  He is no soldier, no state actor.

A criminal.  Criminals in this country get due process. It’s one of things that our country does right, and one of the things we should never let go of. Instead we should wonder at those who would take it away, who would see something they don’t like, and claim that “they” shouldn’t get the same rights the rest of us are entitled to.

Somewhere out there, real terrorists are laughing, noting ironically the speed with which we neuter our own values out of fear. And those who would enable them, those who would claim that one particular type of person with one particular type of beliefs should be singled out for harsher treatment… well, they who would make such claims are the people we should truly fear, truly think of as “enemy.”

Picture Credits:  "Evil Empire" by John Kaminski; Pogo, by Walt Kelly

Thoughts on Boston

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

-- Frank Herbert, in Dune

I

I’ve struggled for most of the past two days wondering what to write—if anything at all—about the recent horror in Boston. Part of me feels compelled to say something, but another part of me fears what that will be: I am too often filled with cynicism, anger, or sarcasm.

II

My wife called one of our clients today, a rote follow-up call regarding a workshop we recently hosted for them. Ironically (I suppose) the session had focused on team-building. The client took the call and apologized for not getting back to us earlier; it seems one of their employees was currently still in a Boston area hospital, and everyone was waiting to hear whether or not she might lose one of her legs.

III

News cycles must be filled; it is our twenty-first century mantra, the cornerstone of our media mania. We listen to the news, then the commentary on the news, then the commentary on the commentary. We soon grow worried, then numb, then frustrated until, finally, we fill in the gaps, pretend to know the unknowns. We don’t like unfinished stories; we need beginnings and middles and ends with plots that cohere, that make sense (even in nonsensical ways). And so, for a brief time, we converted a hospitalized witness into a suspect, noting that he was Saudi Arabian.  And then we published an interview with his roommate.  I wonder: Does this say as much about our willingness to terrorize as the act itself?

IV

All life is lived within the comforting illusion of safety. We know it, viscerally, yet carry on anyway. This is perhaps the bravest thing about the human condition, that, and our willingness to help others when the illusion is shattered. The famous psychologist Abraham Maslow (who spent time at Brandeis University, just outside of Boston) wrote that "In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.” These outer moments become the test of our inner strength, as does our willingness to share that strength with those around us, whether family or friends or strangers. Whether us or them.

V

I flipped through the channels. Here in New England both the local and national stations offered near-continuous coverage.  The same images repeatedly blanketed the screen; only the voice-overs changed. Little was known; littler of meaning was said.  In one instance a brave interviewee—someone expert in such crises—parried the attempts of the journalist opposite who had decided, not surprisingly, to fill in the vast narrative holes with supposition and suspicion. The guest, rightly, kept pushing back, reminding the prodding host that we knew almost nothing, that we had no claimants, no suspects, not even a reliable timeline of events. Also not surprising was the length of the guest’s appearance: all too brief. When nothing is known, the script says “invent,” and this guest, refusing to, left us with the merely uninteresting truth.

VI

It may be a while before we know what happened, but most expect that eventually we will. Science, forensics, and human nature soon reveal the hidden in such cases. Our challenge then will be to hold onto that truth for what it is, to resist the attempts to morph it into a larger story, one that further divides us.  This is not a time for division, nor a story to be used for such purposes.

VII

The Boston Marathon will run next year, and the year after, and the year after that. We are not a people wont to cower. We have learned (and frequently relearn) this important lesson: If we wish to be free, if we wish to rise and show the world the face of that freedom, then we must recognize that the only true way to do that is, simply put, to do it, to be free and to show that freedom to the world. Let us never forget that freedom is a marathon worth running, and one that we will continue to run.