I had a conversation with Bonddad this week, and he said something that really struck a chord with me. I have a hunch that I will fail if I try to paraphrase his exact comment, so what follows is my own interpretation and opinions. Just stay with me a little bit.
The conversation was about the Democratic Party, but I'm going to back up a bit and share some experiences I had before we had this particular conversation, and then put the conversation in context.
Many of you know I am a vegetarian, and lately I've become a vegan (Sorry to keep talking about this, but the main point of this diary is about politics, not food. I just only know how to illustrate the point by relating it to food).
I'm not the world's best vegan. I eat honey; vegans don't. If I raised my own chickens, I'd probably eat eggs. Or, more likely, my cats would eat chickens. So, I don't raise chickens and I don't eat eggs.
Vegans have gotten pretty angry at me for labeling myself a vegan, when I am obviously a VERY disobedient one and I flaunt it. I don't have any particular love for bees, nor do I have any qualms with exploiting them to steal their honey.
My main reasons for changing my dietary habits (whether it is eating organic and local foods or giving up meat) are environmental and health-related. What good is giving up honey to those ends? I can get it locally at the Farmer's Market and it has more nutrients in it than sugar.
Truth be told, although I haven't done this in at least six months, I would even consider eating salmon. Not just any salmon - wild Alaskan salmon, only. Especially if (for some reason) I was in Alaska and I was eating local, sustainable food. Now I've gone and pissed off the vegetarians as well as the vegans.
So then, why do I call myself a vegan, if I'm not? That's a lie I tell every day. Calling myself a vegetarian is pretty honest, but for my first six months of "vegetarianism," I did eat wild Alaskan salmon a few times, and I even ate an organic turkey at Thanksgiving to make my first trip home as a vegetarian easy on my mom.
I label myself a vegan because people don't understand nuance, and ultimately, they don't have time for the long story, and they don't care. They want you to get to the point. We're having dinner - what can you eat? Meat? No. Eggs? No. Dairy? No. OK. Most non-vegans don't even know that vegans won't eat honey. Why quibble.
Before I became a vegetarian, I told myself I would never give up meat because I didn't see a reason to give up ALL meat. But then, slowly, one by one, I gave up certain types of meat. First beef. Then pork. Then non-eco-friendly fish.
I'd've probably eaten grass fed beef, had I known about it at the time (I didn't). And I would have eaten organic pork that was sustainably raised, if any restaurants had served it. I knew of a few restaurants that made an effort to have eco-friendly fish, so I would try to go there for fish.
So why not stay that way? Keep the omnivore label and state that I do eat meat, but only sustainable meats. At that point in my life, I was going out for business dinners several nights a week, and at least one of those nights was with customers. I looked high maintenance and picky. "Excuse me, waiter, but can you tell me if this salmon is Atlantic or Alaskan?" Yeah, right. And my coworkers made fun of me.
Then, when I, the omnivore, opted to order a vegetarian dish, it appeared to others like I didn't like the restaurant (getting the mushroom risotto was one thing, but I've also ordered nothing but a sweet potato at a steak place, and a bowl of spinach at another place... that looked odd to people).
I tried calling myself a vegetarian and eating only sustainable meats - which meant I was a vegetarian 95% of the time, since I can name exactly two restaurants that serve sustainable meats and I can't afford to eat at one of them more than about once a year. Around that time, I told my mom that I would eat the Thanksgiving turkey, but only if it was organic.
When I arrived home for Thanksgiving last year, I was hungry. It was late. Fortunately, my mom, who is a terrific cook, had just finished simmering a delicious-smelling vegetable soup. She offered me some, and I asked if she made it with chicken broth.
"It's organic chicken broth," she said. "You can eat it. It's organic." Well, that doesn't negate the fact that you made it with dead chicken.
An early lesson I learned as a vegetarian is that you need to be consistent. You can't be a vegetarian 95% of the time, even if it is well within your moral code to eat sustainable meats the other 5%. People don't get it. My mom certainly didn't get it.
I'd consented to the turkey to give her a bit of a break. It was also a bit of bribery. I knew the only way I could get my family to buy organic was to give that ultimatum - I'll eat it if it's organic, otherwise I won't eat it. I figured, she's buying a turkey one way or another, whether or not I have any. I'd rather my whole family eat organic, and if it means I eat it too, so be it.
Next year, I'm not eating the turkey. My bad decision haunted me all week. If it was OK for me to eat organic turkey, then Mom put organic chicken broth in the "vegetarian" stuffing too (the recipe is on my website Persistent Vegetarian State if you want it - it's great stuffing!). I watched her put it in. She could have gotten vegetable broth. She could have used it. That is the world's easiest substitution you can do to make a recipe vegetarian. But, no.
So now I call myself a vegan and I eat vegan foods (plus honey). I'm not sold on the extremism of the lifestyle, although I don't think I'd go back to eating meat. I wear the leather jacket and leather shoes I owned before I went veg, although I won't buy more leather. But even that trips people up.
So here's where the topic transitions from my battles with my mom over the stuffing to politics. What I learned over a few months of going veg, the Dems don't get.
You don't have unlimited time to explain things to people. After a few seconds, they tune you out. In a half an hour, I can tell people exactly what I eat and why. I have exactly four friends who care enough about my diet to listen that long.
Same goes for the Democrats. They can write up a very nuanced and complete platform on an issue and post it on dKos. We'll read it. But most people won't.
I've even changed my diet over the past year. I went from vegetarian to vegan. While I didn't give up meat for ethical reasons, after not having eaten it for a while, it seemed horribly inhumane to kill my food. If I wasn't a vegetarian for ethical reasons before, now I am. There's another nuance people can't really handle. It's like, we're catering lunch for the whole project team. Two months ago you said you were vegetarian, so we ordered you cheese pizza. What do you mean you're vegan?
Anyone who knows the gradual learning process I went through over the past year might respect that decison; to the other 99.9% of people, I'm fickle and a pain in the butt. In politics, they call that waffling. Democrats, are you writing this down?
Bush gets this. He said it one way:
"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." --George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005
Someone we like gets it too - and we adored him for it. Paul Hackett said "I said it, I meant it, I stand behind it."
Deep thinking is essential for running the country well; speaking in 30 second sound bytes and bumper sticker slogans is what plays well to get elected.
Changing your opinion to fit the current circumstances is appropriate when making decisions that affect our nation; changing your opinion confuses voters.
It's crappy but it's the truth. It's the game, and we have no choice but to play it.
If you try to be all things to all people, you will stand for nothing. If you try to design a platform so that the Republicans cannot criticize you for it, you'll fail. Don't try. I'd rather seen a good, strong, consistent platform that voters can understand. The Republicans will go after you for it no matter what. It's politics. Fight back.