Why Conservatives don’t get IT?
After the recent presidential elections, it seems that we’ve been drowned by a deluge of arm-chair media pundits – from all sides of the political and philosophical aisle – telling us that Conservatives just don’t get IT. Liberals will boldly profess that Conservatives are out of touch. Conservatives will claim they didn’t effectively get their message out. The person on the street sits back and watches the verbal elbows fly back and forth; awaiting some one-liner to tickle their fancy. It often gets so confusing. But no matter how often you say the wrong thing...it’s still the wrong thing said.
One of the most interesting aspects of modern-day thinking is not how polarized it is; but rather how silly and asinine the basis is for the polarization. For example, a lot of liberal-minded folks cling to the fallacy of the clock; saying that Conservatives and their views of human morality (i.e. abortion, tax proportionality, caring for folks, etc…) are not up to date. At first glance this may appear to address the election count, but it does little to address the underlying issue of why Conservatives just don’t get IT. A date has no character. Slavery was wrong in 1860 and wrong today. Yet, a lot of people swallow the cheap clichés and silly analogies; and accept them as actually truisms, superior to the real issue at hand.
Inseparably linked to the fallacy of the clock, is our confused notion of progress. It’s a simple matter of having things ass-backwards. Progress is never about changing the vision to suit the world; it is always (or should be) about changing the world to suit the vision. Progress should always mean that we are trying to be more just, more kind, more compassionate, more caring. It has little to do with running away from the tax man. It has everything to do with running to the leper. Conservatives don’t get IT. Their vision is more than blurred, it is blind.
Conservatives don’t get IT because their basis for conservatism is based on the false idea that if you leave things alone, you will leave things as they are. Or, in their minds, you leave things as they should be. But this basis is false; because if you leave something alone, you leave it susceptible to a deluge of change. And the constant corruption of things is the only case against being conservative. It is also the best argument for being progressive. A child becomes nasty, if not constantly nurtured and loved. A white house becomes grey if not painted and maintained properly. A body becomes fat unless nourished and exercised often. And Conservatives don’t get IT, when they simply talk of leaving alone a world gone mad.
Instead of working vigorously to help the poorest amongst us, they whine and pontificate about taxing less, even if taxing less makes economic sense. They propose and defend immoral and unjust wars, worship private health insurance programs that rob 25% of our incomes, praise a plagued and infected financial system as being truly free markets, and speak of illegals as dirty parasites from Mars. Conservatives don’t get IT because they are too busy defending the indefensible. The progressive will add that the conservative is also too busy (selfishly) counting money. golfing all day at the club, and constantly shopping for nothing. And amidst the BS and deception, corruption wins the day. In the absence of true leadership, we get silly tyrants.
St Francis of Assisi’s life was transformed in many ways. One of the pivotal times was when he had returned from a disappointing chapter in his life and was riding his horse listlessly in the countryside. Off in the distance, he noticed a small figure. In time, the figure showed himself, and Francis froze-still with fear…the type of fear that instantly challenged his courage. It became clear that the man in the distance was a leper. And Francis was faced with a profound call that demanded a response. Fortunately, he answered the call. He jumped from his horse, and ran to embrace the leper with a force that not only crushed the leper’s misery, but banished the fear from Francis’s bones as well…and transformed him. Francis then not only gave the poor leper what he could at that moment, but this encounter marked the beginning of a life-long service to the lepers of his day. Francis had stared down the corruption of the leprosy; and dealt with it the way a real man should.
Liberals will continue to pound the punch-lines of ‘out of touch’ conservatives while pounding their chests as the only real watchdogs for the people. Media outlets will spew their sordid view of what should and shouldn’t be the standards for modern life, referring to a spurious creed of the clock, a sense of progress hell-bent on changing the vision to fit the corruption posed by the world, and a 24/7 finger-pointing game to a conservative crew who just doesn’t get IT. Independents and others will naturally look at all the name-calling and hypocrisy as ugly, and choose another path.
Conservatives don’t get IT. And the reason they don’t get it is because they defend the indefensible, continuously adopt a creed of self-interest, and respond to a corrupted world gone mad with empty rhetoric, outdated clichés, and the belief that their blogs referring to old guys with wigs will somehow spur folks to action. Is it any wonder the corruption grows exponentially each day?
Conservatives can only make things better if the conservative vision is fixed and focused on making things better, by being the best progressives (in the truest sense) that any conservative can imagine. It’s about working to solve health care instead of defending a greed-driven system that robs 25% of our money and then whining about Obama care. It’s about denouncing immoral and unjust wars for what they are, instead of drinking the kool-aide of wars against ‘terror’. It’s about abolishing the sordid and destructive practices in our financial markets (ie. contagion derivative markets, shorting, hedging, betting, insane leveraging, etc…) instead of mindlessly advocating our free market which has been corrupted at its core. The list is endless, there’s lots of work to be done.
We can fix our economy. We can care for our poor. We can prosper as a people. And we can do so only when conservatives (and liberals and independents) get IT. The solutions have nothing to do with empty rhetoric, or leaving things alone, or defending the indefensible. It takes real work.
It has everything to do with running to the leper.