Repugs. Rethugs. GOoPers.
Asscroft. Ashcan. Bushit.
Arguably clever name plays, but lately, they leave me cold. So cold, in fact, that when I encounter them in any diary or comment at Daily Kos these days, I freeze right there and stop reading, which is too bad since I'm sure there are many good talking points buried in there that I'm missing. And one of the main reasons I come to Dkos is to pick up good analysis and succinct arguments, and to rehearse my own thinking in order to carry it over into the real-world discussions.
I admit I may be blooming into something of a hothouse flower here. If so, forgive me. The pie wars appear to have left me with one less layer of skin than before they started; I'm much more sensitive of late to the power of words after those torrid, fast-paced, thoughtless exchanges. That whole episode left me asking:
How can you disagree with someone passionately, but respectfully? How can you engage in constructive dialogue with someone who has a completely different world view and life experience?
One of the ways, it seems to me, is to choose words carefully - especially in a medium such as this that is purely word-driven - and to stop the name-calling and labeling, not just among ourselves, but with those we view as on "the other side."
I've found myself thinking about what it does in
my own mind, to me, to quickly lump people into categories, to dismiss them as unreachable by sweeping them under a clever, denigrating label, particularly when it's reinforced and echoed in a forum such as this. I'm beginning to suspect it makes me ... well, not as good a person as I aspire to be, for one thing. But more importantly, I think it cuts me off from people who could be reached that I'm dismissively writing off as a lost cause.
Calling people "rethugs" depersonalizes real human beings who are struggling, just as we are, about where they fit in the world, what their responsibilities are and how they're going to put food on the table. Name calling, no matter how humorous, depersonalizes. And when we claim to be progressives who deplore the tendency of conservatives to stereotype whole blocks of people (gays, brown people, women), it seems to me we fall into the trap of the very same shallow thinking we claim to despise.
I had the luck (or misfortune, depending on your point of view) to grow up in a very red county in one of the bluest of states, which made for something of a schizophrenic political orientation.
Most of the people I was raised with consider themselves proudly and unreservedly conservative. For the most part, they tend to be hard-working, often hard-drinking, hard-playing, God-worshipping, America-loving proud individuals who shrink at the thought of taking a government handout. They are good neighbors, loyal friends, attentive parents and dutiful sons and daughters themselves. They often give back much more to their local community than they will ever take out. They are "ignorant" only to the extent that the powers that be and the media collude to make true information complex, boring and unfathomable beyond a small circle of elite specialists or obsessives (like us). And yes, at least in the area I grew up in, they vote Republican.
They work long hours, often at two jobs, and when they come home at the end of the day, they help their kids with homework, prepare meals, fix the toilet and pay bills. The few true leisure hours they have available they choose to spend watching "Survivor" rather than reading up on whether the Bush administration is doctoring climate change reports. I fully sympathize with this escapism; I too often feel powerless, at the mercy of forces beyond my strength and understanding, and hopeless. The fact that I escape through reading and exercise instead of television doesn't make me one whit better than they are. It just makes me different, and respecting human variety and the resultant choices seems to me to be one of the tasks in a citizenship of democracy.
These people - if they can be teased out of a defensive mode of having voted for Bush in the first place - can be reached. When you talk to them, they share many, many of our concerns. They often differ only on remedies, and this seems to be an area where compromise is possible. For example, my old county has undergone explosive growth, and when you listen to "old-timers," there is a lament about overdevelopment, loss of open spaces, smog, traffic and the lack of commitment to the health of the community displayed by the commuters. They don't realize it, but many of them are closet environmentalists who simply haven't met someone willing to engage them on their own ground about possible solutions - solutions that are neither "left" nor "right" but are truly communitarian.
They don't like the war. They despise outsourcing, distrust big government and big corporations, and fear the influx of uncontrolled immigration and the effects of it on the job market, the local schools and the community infrastructure. They don't like America being the boss of the world; they see too many problems within their own city limits affecting their everyday lives that are going unaddressed. They don't want to be told how and when to die, and a lot of them - even the most religious - are uncomfortable with the recent insertion of religiosity into the political sphere (mostly, granted, out of fear that government will start curtailing
their religion someday, not someone else's).
But beginning any discussion with them with name-calling and assumptions of their intractability and stupidity - or even
thinking about them in the privacy of our own minds as "Rethugs" - seems to eliminate any shared ground before any reasonable dialogue can start.
I know that many Kossacks view and use this blog as a place to vent, which is perfectly understandable given our frustration, and the name-calling is part and parcel of that. Since so many smart people of good will here seem to do it, I have to assume that part of the problem lies in my inability to understand what purpose it's serving. In all seriousness, I'm open to hearing how the Daily Kos community thinks the labeling of conservatives advances our cause.