In fairness
Posted by Lissa on August 3, 2008
Goodness. It seems that agonizing self-analysis is nearly as good as Second Amendment posts to attract hits!
As much as it’s a relief to vent all the political stuff, I’d like to post on the other side for a moment. My liberal, Obama-loving, flirting-with-socialism family members truly do try and love their collective brother. The busiest member of my family, the one with the least free time, is also the one who volunteers for anysoldier.com. She collects books and magazines from friends and co-workers; she puts together care packages; she gets donations and special deals on everything from shampoo samples to cooling headbands; and then she ships it all off to Iraq. She’s living proof that, yes, you can support ending the war and support soldiers at the same time. Two other members of my family recently took in a friend-of-a-friend who had no place to stay for the weekend, helped her show up for court, and convinced her — and her husband — to enter drug rehab. They opened their home to her because they felt (yes, *felt*) it was the right thing to do. As a direct result, they’ve changed the course of two peoples’ lives who are now counting months of sobriety.
My family doesn’t read this blog (at least not right now), so this isn’t covering my butt, y’all. A common complaint about the internet is that it allows you to disassociate from your opponents, which makes it easy to use language and take stands that you would never do in person. I’m hopeful that having close, loving family members on the opposite side of the political spectrum will keep me from doing that. For those of you who don’t have the same, feel free to borrow mine for just a moment. They’re living proof that, although liberals don’t agree with conservatives over a host of issues, that doesn’t make them stupid, or evil, or ill-intentioned. They’re admirable people who just think a different way. Let’s not forget that.
lookingforlissa 
Ted said
This is a beautiful post. Bravo.
lookingforlissa said
Grazie, Ted!
E said
Just checked in from VFTP.
I love these mindset posts as I’ve gone through something similar myself. Bravo on your honesty.
However, I’ve discovered *just as much conservative idiocy as liberal idiocy*. In all cases I see that when the brain turns off when the buzz phrases come out, and people use their “side’s” (whatever) slogans to avoid deeper analysis when they don’t actually know what they are talking about.
I think that conservative (little ‘c’) personal behaviors are more sustainable, more scalable. That’s the foundation from which I start. I write software for a living, and if your logic loops don’t scale up under heavy load, then your servers crash because your model is flawed from the start.
Politics and policy are a slightly different matter because they tend to be top-down.
p.s. if you’re trying to resolve the conflict between personal values (i.e. Bill of Rights) and Executive politics, start with this question and see if it leads you anywhere useful: “Bush & Co. are not actually full-time conservatives”. Almost nobody is 100% consistent in their belief system as it matches up with political labels, and career politicians tend to be among the worst of the bunch.
cheers,
-E
E said
that horrible smiley was a mis-interpretation of the wordpress engine.
-E
“A mindset” continued « lookingforlissa said
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