The Devil

Well, first Obama was a foreigner; then he was a Communist; now he's a Socialist.  I suppose that's progress.  My Democratic friends are in uproar.  They raise their hands in astonishment, and say "how could anyone say such things?"

Then, of course, I remember that they said similar things about Bush.  Some said that Bush was a tyrant in training; others said that he was crazy; others that he was evil.

There comes a time when the name game gets old, when the lack of fairness, of common sense, of reality gets irrational to the point of madness.  I want to bite somebody.  The simple fact on both sides is that the other guy is just a human being with his own set of ideas, his own deeply felt principles, his own sense of right and wrong.  I have to accept that fact, even if they do disagree with me.  This is the heart of democracy, the spirit of tolerance and acceptance that grounds the American experiment.  We have to give the other guy the benefit of our common humanity.  He is not the Devil.  His ideas may be stupid; they may lead us to ruin, but we have to assume that they were formed with good faith.  Otherwise, the American experiment is a failure.

What is this experiment?  It was a revolution in ideas about humanity and its place in the universe.  It has certain characteristics:

•  It acknowledged that individual rights are derived from a Creator.
  
• It was based on enduring principles compatible with "the laws of nature and of nature's God."
  
• It recognized human imperfection and that a tendency to abuse power is ever present in the human heart.
  
• It restrained those in power through a written Constitu­tion which carefully divided, balanced, and separated the powers of government and then intricately knitted them back together again through a system of checks and balances.
  
• It left all powers with the people, except those which, by their consent, the people delegated to government ­and then made provision for their withdrawing that power, if it was abused.

This was a dangerous new idea, one that believes in human nature, while avoiding naivete about that nature.  It has become the template which measures all subsequent social experiments were measured. We should keep this in mind when we face the Other Guy and call him names.

A Plague on Both Your Houses

I have been a Democrat for the last thirty years.  Before that, I was a Republican.  My family are all Republicans, so I voted for Nixon, to my undying shame.  I was young.  But I also voted for Clinton and Obama, so I think I have earned my Purple Heart of Confusion.  Right now, my wife and I are still registered Democrats, because we we really can't bring ourselves to sign up as Republicans, and Independent seems so wobbly legs and we'd like to vote in somebody's primary.  The problem for both of us is that we are believing Catholics, and were once involved in the Sanctuary movement.  I walked on the Bethlehem Peace Pilgrimage and demonstrated against nukes at the Bremerton Navy Yard.  I've been to prayer vigils at Trinity Site in New Mexico, demonstrated against the Vietnam War (I was disenchanted with Nixon by that time), and held endless debates with friends and family about the downtrodden and the poor around the world.

But then, the Democratic Party began to change.  Don't get me wrong--I was a great supporter of Liberation movements of all kinds, including Feminism, and for years I ignored the dark underbelly of the very movements that I loved so fiercely.  Abortion was my Waterloo.  I couldn't follow my Party down that path.  I believe in a woman's right to choose, but I also think that we've bent ourselves into pretzels trying to pretend that the baby isn't human.  This, I think, is a very dangerous move.  This country has tried to raise up one group on the backs of another since the Revolution, and each time, we have later regretted it.  When Andrew Jackson tried to support the small farmer, he ended up forcing the Cherokee onto a death march to Oklahoma.  We've supported the southern economy on the backs of African Americans, and built the railroads on the backs of the Chinese.

If we believe in human rights, then those rights have to be extended to everybody, born and unborn, white and black, women and men.  Otherwise, sooner or later, no one will have rights.  So now I am a wanderer, a cafeteria Democrat, picking and choosing my positions with care.  The hardest thing for me is to realize that as a Catholic, my Party doesn't really want my participation.  Anti-Catholicism is now on the menu at Democratic conferences, and the people on the left now see me as a conservative simply because I cannot swallow abortion.  Therefore, my wife and I are dancing between parties, hoping to find a home.