(Originally published in the Lincoln News Messenger)
In the political spectrum’s center, liberals and conservatives stand side by side. There is no closer division. And the closer they stand together, the healthier the society they represent.
I’m afraid I see our country may be losing that center That is, I believe, because liberals and conservatives have listening to one another.
Liberals and conservatives have shared (in equal proportions) every society since time immemorial. Both have always been here. Both are here to stay.
Indeed, it is those societies that attempt to defeat this duality that are most inefficient and unjust. These are the multiple parties of South American countries or the dictatorships of the Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
In my admitted low-brow look at history, when America in the mid-1900s began to vote for Republican presidents and Democratic Congresses, a chain of events began to separate us.
Secure to the point of disrespect the Congressional Democrats stopped listening to Republican views; a Republican resident (Nixon) broke with tradition and nominated Supreme Court judges by their political views rather than their jurist skills.
This tit-for-tat cancer spread until we have what has been the earliest and promises to be the nastiest presidential campaign yet.
This past weekend, Bob Dole, ex-presidential candidate, said that communication in Congress is nastier than just ten years before when he was the Senate minority leader.
In Dole’s last year in the Senate killing violence by Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) on April 24, 1995 (in Sacramento) occurred just five days after the killing violence of Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma bomber).
Each man represented the extreme of the political spectrum. Yet I suggest they had ore in common with each other than they did with either liberals or conservatives.
I believe they presented chaos. They stopped regarding the value, the perspective, even the least respect for any other view. They and other violent pursuers of self-important, self-righteous causes stopped listening.
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