my truth vs your truth vs someone else’s truth
a couple of days ago, romare and i were throwing back a couple (ok, maybe 8 or 9) of beers and our meandering conversation meandered its way to politics. this is not uncommon (the beers and the meandering). we began to discuss politics and the role of politics and we talked about whether or not we should use this forum (tth) as i platform to talk about our views on the whole state of the world and such. he thought we should. i was unsure. but a couple of days have passed now and i’m beginning to think that maybe it would be ok to every now and again talk about the workings of our government or someone else’s government. so i’m going to very briefly.
let me start out by saying that i lean to the left generally when it comes to speaking about politics in the good ole’ us of a. that said, i think it is unfortunate that we tend to categorize one another. no one i know is always a conservative on every issue. no liberals are always liberals. at least people who think. we all fall in diffferent places based on issues. i might be fiscally conservative but i might also support public schools. most people are not always one animal or the other. we are a mixture of beliefs based on our abilities to reason and to measure what we hear and see with what has been taught to us by family, friends, and other outlets of information. if you think, you are a conglomeration of thought, and most of us don’t know where all of our beliefs come from because we don’t spend a whole lot of time examining the source of these beliefs. we just believe them to be ours.
these beliefs then shape our outlook on the world. but belief is not reality. let me give you an example. do you remember a time when you were a kid and you thought that your mom or your dad or your grandpa or grandma or whoever was the best cook you knew? that was probably based on a small view of the world. how many people had cooked for you? they might have been the best cook you had ever tasted. but then you grew up, moved away, maybe travelled, tasted lots of food in different places. at some point you realized maybe they weren’t the best cook (even if they cooked it up with love). maybe they always, always overcooked the green beans.
the point of this is to say that most of our belief systems are established when we are young and it takes a long time and a lot of experience to break out of these small worlds. we do it through experiences. we measure this based on that. we encounter one thing that makes us change our views. that’s how we grow. something challenges a strongly held belief and makes us reexamine ourselves. if we do it enough, examine lots of cooking or whatever, we find that the things that we used to hold sacred begin to erode and we establish new likes and dislikes based on the people that we have become. not on the people that we were.
politics is hard though. most of us have only known two parties and one system of government. how do you change your thought process in this environment. how do we challenge ourselves to become better? are the republicans the better cooks or are the democrats? that’s not much of a choice. so we steadfastly hold to our belief that one or the other is better, even in the face of evidence maybe to the contrary with regards to singular issues. or maybe because of singular issues. “i’m a republican because they are for the death penalty,” is an acceptable statement. can you imagine saying “my grandma is the best cook in the world because she makes really good fried chicken?” in both cases one issue makes them the best-out of all the others.
the problem is that we have so little experience with alternatives. how many of us have ever lived in a different governmental system with a variety of parties? how many of us have lived in a monarchy? how many of us have lived in a totalitarian state with no choice? how many of us have lived in a socialist economic system with a plurality of parties? how about a communist economic system with a king? we just haven’t seen or delved deeply into all the alternatives so we only know what we know based on what we have. nothing has challenged our beliefs so we keep going with what we have always believed. our grandma is the best cook.
i’m certainly not arguing for a rebellion nor am i arguing for a complete overhaul of our political and economic systems. i’m merely trying to point out something that should be painfully obvious. unless we really go out and seek information, unless we really go out and learn about other countries and other forms of government and other economies, then our parties will always be the best. we have nothing else to compare them with. nothing will ever challenge our beliefs if we don’t actively seek out things that do. we have to be ready to challenge ourselves if we want to learn and grow. we have to try some other forms of cooking.
that’s it.
