I made a friend on Facebook last night. A very unlikely friend. A gun rights advocate, with buzz cut, tattoos and a Confederate flag on his FB homepage.
I wrote this letter to him to thank him and try to express the significance this small act held for me.
[not his actual name pending his permission to use it]
Dear Ron,
Thanks for accepting the friend request. I think something momentous happened when you did that. I went to bed glowing with hope for this country for the first time in years.
You did that.
If you and I can become friends and start talking rationally to each other and find common ground and agree on what we are fighting for and against, anything is possible.
-joke-
You're making this too easy Ron. From your self-description you shared of your political stances, you're a Liberal just like me. I was hoping for a Real Conservative to argue with. Don't worry, I don't know any of your friends. Your secret is safe with me.
-/joke-
LOL
I've been trying to open dialog with the ‘other’ side for decades. Never get anywhere. Been looking for a guy like you forever.
The country is divided Ron. There's no question about that.
How did it get that way? What keeps it that way? What facilitates and exaggerates that Divide day in and day out?
Those are pretty simple questions and the answers are pretty obvious. We may disagree on some specifics, I'd say Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, RW hate radio, web sites like Free Republic, Brieitbart, etc., you might point to some media outlets on "our" side.
We're BOTH right.
Here's the important question to ask IMHO:
WHO BENEFITS? WHO GETS RICH AND POWERFUL FROM KEEPING US AT EACH OTHER'S THROATS?
What you may or may not know is: I Love guys like you. Joe Six Pack. I believe in fighting for guys like you. THAT is what defines me as a LIBERAL. Period. Believe it or not.
The word Liberal was co-opted and redefined by Rush Limbaugh back in the 80s to be everything the identified target audience found threatening and infuriating lumped together. The target audience could then be manipulated to vote for the Candidates Who Represent Them (Sarah Palin fer instance) and in other ways to affect policy outcomes to benefit the people who are running the show. (i.e. The Tea Party causing chaos during the Health Insurance Reform Debate aka the falsely labeled “ObamaCare” hysteria.)
For the past couple decades they have built on and reinforced that demonization constantly day in and day out. 24/7/365
Consequently “Conservatism” became mostly associated with that point of view alone: Hatred for all those “Liberals” who were out to Destroy America. This created the Divide. In a nutshell.
People with formerly considered “liberal” views, who held some, rarely all, of the viewpoints and values, or put forth ideas or policies, now associated with the massive secret “Threat” out there had to do something.
These people were now labeled as LIBERALS, and were depicted as a supposedly massive and all-powerful and deeply embedded "Threat" to "Real American Values" but previously such a "thing" didn’t really exist as anything other than a collection of various beliefs which ‘conservative’ (aka powerful monied) interests found threatening or determined that their target audience found threatening.
In order to protect "Our" values, and even our right to espouse them, we had to start organizing and creating some kind of structure and organizations to counter this juggernaut of propaganda. So far "we" haven’t done too well at that. We’re getting there... But we’ve done enough, like create groups and web sites like MoveOn.org, Media Matters, Daily Kos and such that the RW media machine can point to as evidence that the “Threat” is Real and Organized. Thereby also reinforcing their supporting myth of “Media Liberal Bias” and you can Only Trust Us to Tell YOU the Truth. (be happy to argue about this, but it’s a digression, so let’s not ok?)
From the get go and continuing today, most of the media outlets and organizations MSNBC is about it in MSM) that still manage to get the “Liberal” point of view (aka “bias”--that’s such a joke) out there mostly spend a huge part of their time trying to deconstruct and invalidate the giant mountain of bullshit coming from the RW media machine. (John Stewart and Rachel Maddow are the Best at this, but it really doesn’t accomplish a thing sadly. Preaching to the choir. Unless we can get guys like you Ron to listen to them.)
I keep looking for someplace or something that’s telling “you guys” what it is we believe in and what we are fighting for and I just don’t see it. The phony view of “Liberal” is everywhere and entrenched and largely unassailable within the minds of the "true believers." Which is why I had such a hard time ever finding a guy like you who used his brain rather than this 'conservative belief system' to evaluate, well, anything.
But I had faith YOU were out there.
(You don’t know how relieved I was when I read your first post. You got me at “your childlike naivety” and sealed the deal with “We’re neighbors!” The ironic thing is I wasn’t expecting any of this when I posted that thing on FB. I was just trying to show that there was no rational connection between the first statement and the last. You caught the first break in the logic and called me on it. I sat up in my chair, and felt a glimmer of hope for the first time in years.)
The mistake “my” side keeps making is to write all “you guys” off as a lost cause.
But in a way you can’t blame them. No one ever sees guys like the real individual Ron M. You are rare and very hard to find. I'd about given up hope.
They just see the idiots with the misspelled signs raving about things which didn’t happen or didn’t exist and everyone that ever tried to talk to any of them got nowhere as they just regurgitated their RW implanted belief system.
(How this works in the actual brain has been studied scientifically BTW, a guy named Dr. George Lakoff is the main guy, interesting stuff...Conservative media has used it to their advantage, Luntz is their main guy, while the supposedly rational scientifically oriented “left” has failed to implement it, mostly, but that’s a major digression. I was hoping to keep this brief and simple. Fail. LOL)
Ok I’ll try to get to the point.
Their Plan. Divide and Conquer.
That’s it.
You and I are pretty much on the Same Page. We’re Americans. We’re Neighbors.
We may have a few core beliefs that differ, but mainly we disagree regarding how to address the problems facing our country and our society.
The hot button right now of course is, how best to deal with the rising gun violence and still respect individual rights to self-protection. But even on this issue we both want basically the same outcome:
Less babies killed by nut cases.
They spotlight those differences of opinion on how to address an issue and use them as “wedge” issues to drive us apart.
They do this by enlarging and distorting them into opposing “Beliefs.”
“Can we find a way to stop babies from getting killed with assault weapons?”
becomes
“Liberals Want to Take Away Your Guns!”
From there it’s an easy step back to re-triggering the overall Big Lie:
“Liberals Oppose All Our Real American Values”
And the blood rises and the tempers flare...
This is not news is it?
My Theory and My Plan on how to render Their Plan ineffective.
Find and connect with guys like you, the real Ron M. and talk to them. Listen them. Find guys who will listen to us and let them discover that we share a LOT of the same Values and Beliefs, and are both actually interested in preserving our American way of life. That we Love America and each other.
Become Allies!
Unite on common ground to figure out together Who the Bad Guys are and How to Stop Them.
Until we do that we can’t sit down to address and solve the problems facing us effectively. That process is called Democracy. It’s hard to do, pretty much impossible now, because of The Divide.
So we’re back to the important first question to address together:
WHO BENEFITS? WHO GETS RICH AND POWERFUL FROM KEEPING US AT EACH OTHER'S THROATS?
If guys like me and you Ron can start talking, and then start getting other guys to start talking, and find that common ground, and identify the common foe, we can find ways to do something about it.
You in?