(This blog originally carried the title “From the Home Office,: where I posted comments from 2005 – 2013. It has been on hiatus since then as I gradually moved toward posting my opinions on Twitter and Facebook. Recent events have prompted me to re-open and re-brand it to reflect the times. Please feel free to poke around in the archives and to hold be accountable for any evolving positions.)
I am a straight cisgendered white man in his late sixties.
While my politics are left of center, I value traditional conservative
perspectives and agree with more than a few. What I cannot abide is how the
internal corruption of the Republican Party has bred the loathsome entity that
is MAGA.
There was a time when my political views would have been described
as “New England Republican:” socially liberal and fiscally conservative. The
social element comes first. Government is uniquely suited to provide things
people cannot provide for themselves. Infrastructure. Defense. Public safety.
Food that is safe to eat, water that is safe to drink, and air that is safe to
breathe. Affordable medical care. There’s more, but you get the picture.
The fiscally conservative part means I dislike spending
money I don’t have. I’ll save for something before I’ll go into debt for it. Sometimes
it can’t be helped. If the roof or foundation develops a fundamental flaw, I
may have to go into debt to repair it. Few people can pay cash for a new car.
Mortgages are long-term debts. All of these are parts of life.
The two perspectives are not mutually exclusive. We live in
the wealthiest nation in history. There are people living here who are willing to
pay tens of thousands of dollars – millions, even – for a baseball card. They
can afford to pay more for the general welfare. They’ll never miss it.
It has been said that a man who is not liberal when young
has no heart, and one who is not conservative when old has no brain. This is
bullshit. I was much more conservative as a teen than I am now; then I joined
the Army. I saw and did things I had no idea about before, and I never left the
country. The more I experienced, the more I learned, the more I looked at things
from other points of view.
This led me to become a firm believer in treating people the
way I’d like to be treated. This is so self-evident to me I have to assume
everyone feels that way, which leads to what I call King’s Corollary to The
Golden Rule: If someone interacts with me like an insensitive prick, he must
want to be treated that way. It would be impolite not to oblige him. Or her.
Among the reasons I restarted this blog is I no longer
identify as liberal; I’m a pragmatist. I’m willing to listen to ideas from
either side of the aisle, so long as two conditions are met:
1.
They have to have a realistic chance of working.
2.
They have to benefit more people than the
inconvenience.
So don’t tell me building a wall will solve the immigration
problem. It won’t.
Don’t tell me cutting taxes for the rich – again – will
stimulate the economy and balance the budget. It hasn’t in forty years of practice.
Why would it now?
Don’t tell me voter suppression cost Kamala Harris the last
election. It didn’t.
Don’t tell me “abortion” and “women’s health” are
synonymous. They aren’t.
I’ll do my best to keep these posts relatively brief and on
topic, typically the 600 – 800 words of a traditional newspaper column. I have
long said the Internet needs editors and do not intend to add to the problem.
I expect I’ll come down harder on the right than the left – those
who voted to make president a man not fit to run a whorehouse laundry showed
more about their character than his – but I also have little patience with the
purity tests too many on the left apply to measure wokeness.
All I want to do here is point out where we may be missing
something that could help. Maybe get a passerby to think of something they’d
not thought of before. I promise to make every effort not to be the old man
railing at clouds or hollering for kids to stay off my lawn.
I need to work some things out for myself. So does this
country. If anything I say here can contribute to even one person becoming
willing to look at a different perspective – not necessarily change their mind,
but maybe see where the other side is coming from – then this blog will be a
rousing success.
There will be no regular schedule; I’ll post as things come
to mind. I’ll send new post notifications through Facebook and BlueSky. Feel
free to share them and to comment either here, or there. Comment moderation
will be turned on, but only to weed out spam; all on-topic comments will be
allowed to stand.
I hope we can start, and maintain, a cordial place to
disagree on the way to finding common ground. And that you’ll come with me.
