Returning to normal, mostly

[chipotle]

haikujaguar wrote earlier today:

I feel no hatred or anger for the people who disagreed with me. I have no illusions about knowing what motivated their choices. It’s time to move on. I only wish, looking around, that more people felt the same way. It breaks my heart to see people I like painting with so broad a brush. A broad brush might cover a lot of ground, but it destroys the details that transform a piece from mediocrity to sublime beauty.

…which is absolutely true.

But wait! one might say. Given your post earlier today, it’s obvious you have a wee bit of an anger issue there, coyote.

Well, yes, guilty.

But I’m not really angry with people who voted differently, though; I’m angry with the way that my values have been distorted and vilified. I’ve usually tried to treat conservative ideas with respect even when I strenuously disagreed with them, and watching people I once respected demonstrate utter contempt for any idea remotely “liberal” has been more of a shock over the last year than perhaps it should have been.

I drove around for a while, ending up in Pacific Grove, and had lunch at a little grill I wouldn’t recommend. Then I sat in a coffee shop for a while, writing and listening to people talk about the election. (I’d rather not have been listening, frankly, but they got loud.)

I’m still woefully behind where I need to be to keep up with the NaNoWriMo target word count, and letting myself get dangerously behind magazine things, so tomorrow will—I hope—be a day of catchup in both.

Comments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

You're absolutely right. The surprise on a personal level in the past year or so has come from seeing that in people who I haven't considered particularly intolerant. These folks aren't necessarily intolerant in the obvious way of a Pat Buchanan--they've moved past that, to some weird mix of 1950s sitcoms, dominion theology and British colonialism. Some of them will tell you, and mean it, that they're not Christian, they're just absolutely convinced that candidates who want to bring America back to God are the right choice.

Government, to them, is not about policy at all. It's about a strong, patriarchial role model, with the president as a father figure. They may still keep the language of limited government, but it's not ultimately what they want--they're fine with using the power of the state to enforce moral principles. They honestly believe that "liberalism" is all about change for change's sake and that conservatives have to come around and fix the messes that dangerous radical thought always causes. If you point out that all social/political change is seen as dangerous radical thought when it first appears, they simply won't acknowledge it. Somehow, thispoint in history is different. Change now is bad. We need to roll back a few changes. And those of you who can't see that, you don't deserve to be Americans.

I've heard arguments bandied about that Bush needed, needed to be re-elected because, why, you don't change commanders in a war, and doing so would be a sign of weakness. So far I've been afraid to pin one of those people down and say, "Look, the 'war on terror' as the Bush administration has fought it has been a war on states, but as they've defined it, it's a war on a concept, a tactic, and you can't defeat a tactic--so what would you have us do in 2008?"