I live with a person that was very left of me.  She has slowly come over to the right side, we have cookies.  There are still subjects that we strongly disagree about but they are fewer and very different than when we first got together.

I often find myself at the breakfast table speaking about something that has me upset and I ask “What are you seeing in your feeds?”

Her feds are very different from mine.  There have been times when my feed is full of a story.  Often being presented from a leftist point of view.  I’ll ask her “What are you seeing in your feds about story?”  At which point she’ll tell me that she’s not even heard the story.  I’ll send her links.  Or she’ll give me links to something that came across her feds that isn’t showing at all in mine.

She is a great resource.

And yes, I did pick her category.

-AWA

From Behind Enemy Lines

I want you to understand that I did not pick the title. It rankles, and it bothers me, because I don’t see myself as an enemy. I should be an ally, but I often feel I’m not let in, so it doesn’t happen. 

I am here to present different sides to your stories and narratives. Though I am definitely left of the people I live with and love, I am very right of most of my friends. Because of this, I’m everyone’s enemy, apparently. 

One of the worst things we can do, as human beings, is get caught up in our own thought processes. When all you hear is an echo of your own ideologies and topics, you become unbalanced. You lose perspective. You lose your ability to connect as well with your fellow man. Too many people today are unable and unwilling to see what The Other Side has to say on any issue. They’ll read the 120 characters allotted to the Twitterverse, and then apply that to “everyone on The Other Side”. 

The first topic I want to touch on is the idea that someone is out to get you. I know that people on the Left tell me all the time how horrid and aggressive people on the Right are. The Left truly, deeply believes that the Right wants to hurt them. The Left are firmly convinced that the Right actively seeks out ways to damage liberty, freedom, and the Left, not necessarily in that order.

The Right doesn’t seem to harbor that belief to the same level that the Left does. Of the Right leaning people I connect with, none are interested in harming anyone, or causing problems. All they want is to be left alone, to live life however they see fit. The Right camp that hits my media stream seems to be slightly more aggressive in their communications. I hear about how awful the Left is on a regular basis, a lot of whining, a lot of complaining about how they’re tired of being “the bigger person”. What I don’t see, outside of extremists of the Right, are people who want to take away freedom or liberty from the Left.

I hear from a lot of people that the Left are people of feelings and emotions, and the Right are people of logic and facts. It’s my opinion that both of those positions apply to both sides. You just have different things on which you’re emotional and logical.

For instance, when it comes to Second Amendment confrontations, the Right is highly logical. There’s no emotion in it. I have watched countless people on the Right hold up the Second Amendment, and pull it apart in a very rational way. What’s the right being discussed? The right to keep and bear arms. And who is that right recognized for? The people, it says so right there: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms…” And what’s the action applied to that right? “…shall not be infringed.” All very neat and methodical. And correct!

For the Left, it’s a matter of fear. “But what if someone gets hurt?” It’s all about emotions. The Left, as a body, often express disdain for the Second Amendment, but will not organize enough to try and logic their way through removing it. After all, they can do so by working the problem the way the Founding Fathers set it up for them to do. 

When it comes to other issues, though, the Right’s feelings and emotions begin to come to the forefront. Abortion is the hottest topic I can think of, for the Right at the moment, with immigration coming a close second. That logic and rationality seems to go right out the door the moment either topic comes up. 

Without getting into the details of either of the aforementioned topics (let’s leave those for another day), let’s look at whether or not someone is “out to get you.” The first question to ask yourself is, are you personally being attacked? Is there someone telling you, the personal, singular you, that you are a bad person? Is that attack, if you so perceive it to be, a danger to yourself or others close to you?

Please note, when I say attacked, I’m not meaning verbally. It might hurt when people throw words at you, but it’s not damaging. I understand that there may be legal wrangling in there that could put it over the line into the ‘damaging’ category, but that’s not the norm, and I’m avoiding the extremes here. 

And there it is. I’m avoiding the extremes. Why? Because it doesn’t do any good. Because extremes aren’t where we, the vast majority of people on all sides, live. Most people on the Right are not interested in taking away your right to bodily autonomy, birth control, or adults making decisions about their own bodies. Most people on the Left are not interested in burning down courthouses, forcing gender transition on anyone, or indoctrinating little kids.

Friend on the Left says, “Those damn Republicans are trying to take away my bodily autonomy again! They want me to die in a pool of my own blood! The whole lot of them just want women to be hosts for fetuses and nothing else!”

Friend on the Right responds, “Hey, I’m all for birth control, age appropriate sexual education, and everyone being as healthy as they can be. I don’t want women to have to be pregnant if they don’t want to be.”

Left returns with, “Then why are you hanging out with those people who forced a 12 year old girl to carry a child to term, damaging her internal organs?”

But it isn’t just the Left, you know.

Friend on the Right says, “Stupid leftists want little kids to be taking birth control, and everyone to be subverted to become trans!”

Friend on the Left responds, “Not at all. I’d like to see birth control available for those who are sexually active, and I’d like to come up with a way for teens who are not in safe families to get access to that birth control without telling parents who could hurt them. And I don’t want to force anyone to be trans, I just want people to be accepted if they are trans.”

Right returns with, “Then why are you advocating for drag queens in libraries, and having teachers making kids talk about sexual stuff?”

I think that most of what actually goes on tends to get lost in the fracas that happens among the extreme ends of the political spectrum. We’re all so busy looking at the left hand that we don’t see what the right is doing (and that has nothing to do with political sides). It’s really hard to see the actual facts, when every “news” outlet appears to be regurgitating the same thing, word for word. Add to that, common sense doesn’t sell news; drama does. It’s important to keep that in mind whenever you’re looking at what purports to be news today.

Just as an example, I am a person who would love to see marijuana legalized in my state. I believe that everyone has the right (and responsibility, though that’s a whole other article) to own and use a firearm, and that our Constitution guarantees that right. I think our healthcare system is broken in a lot of ways, starting with the insurance companies, but that the care offered is still so much better than every other first world country that it’s unreal. I’d like to see women and men offered reasonably priced birth control that is effective and not harmful to them, without any strings or emotional manipulation attached. 

I’d like to see women have access to abortion up to the 12 week mark, no questions asked, and an admission that after that point, a fetus is no longer “just a clump of cells” and is much more akin to a baby than a virus. I’d like to see people stop caring about sexual orientation, gender, and expression, while doing educated medical study on the process of gender transition and what it does to a person’s body, brain, and personality, and how to best implement it, and who it’s best implemented on. 

I’d like to see the word “organic” mean something again outside of a government patent. I’d love to see sustainable energy models be more used, but in a reasonable and scalable way as we discover the ins and outs of them. I’d love to see paperwork on the environmental impact of each and every sustainable energy model, to see what the pros and cons of each are. 

I’d like to see the Federal minimum wage dropped. After all, if the cost of living in one part of the worldcountry is 65% higher than anywhere else, either we doom certain people to poverty or we are forcing companies to pay more than they can. I’d like to see unions become positive, employee led institutions again that are there to help out the people, not the union. I’d love to have businesses learn from one another to discover models that allow for higher pay and better benefits for employees without messing with the company’s profit margin (Costco comes to mind). 

Some of the things I’ve mentioned above are very “left leaning” ideas, and others are quite “right leaning”. I’m guessing that none of them are disgusting in the eyes of most readers. The fear is not the reasonable idea, but what else might happen because of a badly worded idea. 

I hear talk about “the pendulum”, and it worries me. The Right acknowledges the pendulum exists, and point to it as reason to want to ban abortions entirely, restrict or ban birth control methods, and take away the rights of those who aren’t interested in “one man, one woman” marriages. The Left doesn’t even seem aware of the existence of the pendulum, but just keeps pushing it more in retaliation. 

At this rate, we’ll be at one another’s throats in no time. 

I don’t think it’s because we are all that different from one another. I think it’s because we’re being told we’re different, scary, wrong, sinful, or pick another negative word you’d like to use. I think it’s because we’re being manipulated, sometimes nastily and sometimes subtly. 

I think we all want to get to a similar end point. The goal is a world where people can live in peace, not have to worry about their kids at night, and have enough money even if they aren’t rich. The problem is we have different ideas about how to get to that end point. The media knows that, and pushes all the buttons to make people react. 

So don’t see me as your enemy. Or do. That’s up to you. I’m not interested in fighting you, though. I just want to live my own life, in peace and quiet, and know that my neighborhood is safe and my kids can play and date and learn to drive without concern. 

I’ll try and give an outsider’s perspective on events and goings on, as they happen. I’ll attempt to answer questions as fully as I can, when I can. But I’m not here to argue. I’m not here to change your mind. I’m here to overturn your echo chamber.

Heuristic Hagar