The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Bob Butler 54]

You know, there are times, especially when I am covering the 2nd Amendment or the Middle East, when I advocate against trying to change a culture by force.  There is a reason why cultures exist.  Many who live in that culture believe those reasons quite valid still.  Outside ways are strange and new.

And I wind up advising against butting one’s head against the wall.  One just isn’t going to get there from here within a reasonable time.

And there are other times, say racism and environmentalism, when I will invoke the arrow of progress.  The conservative side of the US Civil War wanted to continue a system with agriculture supreme economically, and depreciating the abilities of blacks.  You just knew that against the forces of industrialization and equality, they were not only going to lose but they were wrong.  The positions the conservatives took on how things had been would become untenable in the future.

That is when I’m at my most Whiggish.  What were the conservatives thinking?  You just know how it is going to go.  You know what the values of the future will be.

And that may be the partisan divide right there.  Clinging to how things have always been against seeing what they have to become.

My niece earned an oceanic and environmental degree.  One of her job offers on graduation was for an Appalachian coal company renowned for putting profit over the environment.  She just made up her mind not to work towards yesterday.  She wanted to do something else with her degree, and passed up on the job.  It sort of illustrates the progressive perspective.

Now I was thinking a bit about clearcutting the Appalachians during the Guilded Age.  Not only profits above environmentalism, but profits on steroids.  I’d like to think that wouldn’t happen today.  Even the most conservative elite running a wood company for profit would have some sort of environmental forestry team making sure the operation was sustainable a generation or so downstream.  

And even a KKK sheet head wouldn’t be advocating slavery today.  A conservative of 4 or 8 turnings ago is very different in advocating his position than those of today.

But that is where I am mostly progressive.  

Yes, there are times when butting your head against a wall is stupid.  There are times to state which way the wind is blowing, and admit that it is not blowing hard enough.

But there are times when you listen to the conservatives, shake you head at what they adhere to, and ask how they can be so wrong.  The lack of morality of slavery.  The greed of the robber barons of the Gilded Age.  The lack of getting it about the environment today.

You want to be on that side of history?  Really?