We're Gonna Have to Work Together on This

 (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.