It's a mark of how mindlessly polarized political discourse in this country has become that quite a while back, one of my kids asked from the back seat, "Mom, what is a liberal?"--and my mind went blank. My first response: "Well, it's not a dirty word, whatever you may have heard."
But then I was stumped. "Liberals care about people, honey, and conservatives only care about money." Won't do, any more than "Conservatives care about their country, honey, while liberals only care about their own selfish personal rights." Even my own brain had gotten stupid, and I hadn't even been watching Glenn Beck. I finally gave her some kind of half-assed answer, but I wasn't happy with being that unprepared. And I realized that I have been so busy taking aim at the Other Side's arguments, like I was Annie Oakley at a skeet shoot, that I haven't given nearly enough thought to why I think the way I do. Everything is either/or these days that I feel like some kid in a dysfunctional family which can never handle the tiniest crisis without a lot of screaming and sulking and pointless drama.
So here's what I've been doing: I've got my car radio programmed to a right-wing religiously affiliated station, the kind that in the past I've avoided like a case of Ebola. I hit that button from time to time, just to hear what they're saying out there in right-wing land. And I've actually learned some things. This station has a call-in program on in the afternoons for people with personal problems, and they give pretty good advice. I haven't heard a thing on abortion that I agree with, but I'm understanding better why it seems to pop up in the news so constantly: there's a whole cadre of conservative fund-raisers out there who make a living by shoehorning this issue into every conceivable debate; if it weren't for getting people riled up on abortion, they'd have to go out and actually get a J-O-B. (And just for the record, I've never met a soul who is actually in favor of abortion.) I've gained some perspective on things I heard in my childhood. I've listened to preachers long enough to realize that, if you can get past the way they're saying it, what they're saying can often be boiled down into common-sense positions on the value of family life and community and personal responsibility. In short, I have slowly come to start hearing people instead of caricatures.
Sometimes I do say, "Oh, for Chrissake! What a moron!" and switch it off, but it doesn't happen as often as you'd think. I still don't agree with most of what I hear. But at least I'm hearing it, and not mocking it or yelling back at it. Now, if only the Other Side would do that for me...
