By Mark Staples
Montana Tavern Association
Government Affairs Counsel
You check both your interior and exterior rearview mirrors. The road appears clear to change lanes. You make your move, then a car horn lifts you an inch off your seat as you just miss slapping metal with a low slung sports car.
Where the hell did he come from you ask as your heart fibrillates. Ah, yes, the "blind spot."
Politics has them too, those points of view one party or the other can't seem to see no matter how many angles they have to look at them.
The most "hang 'em high" conservative hardliners are also often the most impossible vote to get on funding the very law and order measures or prison cells they espouse. Meanwhile, the most impassioned liberal defenders of personal choice and an all-encompassing right of privacy are often also the first in line to impose government behavior-control straitjackets on people whose choice of legal pursuits differ from theirs . . . (in the name of protecting those misbegotten souls from themselves, of course).
Some hardline conservatives cannot conceive, much less concede, that some "social programs" are in fact morally mandated and effective in lifting the quality and fairness of life for all. Meanwhile, some diehard liberals cannot admit--or even fathom--that some other "social programs" accomplish little but to create self-serving, petrified bureaucracies while infantilizing entire sections of the population.
Some liberals cannot look objectively at the proposition--or the empirical evidence--that tax decreases (I prefer "refunds") spur the economy more sustainably than increased government spending. At the same time, some conservatives are actually fine with the concept of government spending, but only if it benefits economic sectors within which their constituents--and supporters--operate.
One could take the more cynical view and say that we are awash in hypocrisy in our political world. But knowing--and liking personally as I do--many of the most intransigent souls on either side of the political spectrum, I honestly don't think that' the case.
These people are true believers in their hard-core social philosophies; they simply cannot consider that there could be some validity to their opponents' worldviews. They're bright, sometimes startlingly so, accomplished, personable, and articulate. They nurture wonderful families, do good civic works, and they make steadfast friends. But there seems to be in their makeup these pervasive "blind spots." Because of them, we have horrific wrecks at every level of our political system.
Poll after poll shows the U.S. public has had it with being caught up in or stalled behind these smash-ups.
I predict that those who learn to eliminate their "blind spots" will be in coming years the drivers of American politics.
Those who can't will be left in tangled heaps at the side of the road.
Source: The Montana Tavern Times, April, 2008, published monthly by Continental Communications, 125 W. Granite St., Suite 102, Butte, MT 59701.