On Tuesday, I didn't listen to any of the reports coming from exit polls or anything all day long. We had scouts in the afternoon, and after that I dropped Mosey off at home, made some quick sandwiches for the boys, and then went to see a movie. Afterward I sat in a Walmart parking lot until 11:00, reading a book, and then headed home. My feelings had been growing darker and darker all afternoon and evening long, and so when I got home and saw that all the lights were off, then went inside and found everyone asleep in bed, I wasn't surprised. I was just incredibly sad. I went to bed, slept fitfully for about 3 hours, then woke up and lay in bed, my thoughts churning for the rest of the night.
Yesterday was a terrible day. I cried all day long, I'm not embarrassed to admit. I felt physically ill and couldn't eat anything the whole day. We didn't do any school, and Ben didn't go to work. I think I just wandered around in shock and grief. At night I watched 24 reruns until I was falling asleep in my chair and then went to bed.
I thought I might wake up this morning feeling a little better, gaining some perspective. I didn't. Disappointment has always been my most difficult emotion to process, and this is a big one for me. Six years is a long time to build up hopes. And I feel sick, just absolutely sick about what the next four years are going to bring. The idea that Obama thinks that his re-election means he has some kind of mandate makes me want to scream and throw things. It's the worst kind of fight-or-flight response. There's no one to fight, and no where to run. I just can't believe it's over.
2. The boys are doing OK. I thought they might be really upset, considering how involved they have been in this election process-- well over a year now. But they are doing fine. I'm glad for that.
3. I have so many reasons for feeling sad and depressed, but I can't go into all of it. One thing that is really depressing to me is to think that if Romney had won (and I really, truly believed he was going to pull it off-- up to Tuesday afternoon, when a feeling of dread settled over me-- a premonition, I guess), then an equal but opposite proportion of the population would be feeling just as devastated as I am now. I think that if Romney had been elected, he had the biggest chance of anyone to "bring us together," given the fact that he has a pretty good track record of doing just that in Massachusetts, but as it is now, this country is going to only get more and more divided along ideological fault lines. I think there is actually very little common ground between left and right. People like to say that our goals are the same, it is just the methods that we disagree on, but I don't even think that is correct. Maybe in a very, very broad sense, in that everyone agrees that having a job, and good health are good things. But even those simple things are not simple when viewed from the left and the right, because the priorities are so different. How do you prioritize income opportunity versus income equality? Quality of health care versus equality of health care? The end of life versus the beginning of life? Marriage as an institution validating love between two adult individuals versus marriage as an institution to protect children? Environmental protection versus economic development, national security, and personal freedom? The list goes on and on. These are fundamental questions, with fundamentally different answers, left from right.
My sister posted an article on facebook a few days before the election, in which the owner of a high-end match-making service observed that more and more people using her service now will not consider dating a person of the opposite political persuasion, no matter what other commonalities they have. My sister was puzzled and dismayed by this trend, but it makes sense to me. If you take politics seriously, and have deep ideological underpinnings for your political beliefs, then the fact that another person is on the "other side," speaks volumes about that person's fundamental values and priorities.
I suppose if you are not terribly ideologically grounded in your politics, or if you don't mind sharing your life with a person that has a fundamentally different worldview from your own (truly, I don't know how James Carville and Mary Matalin get along!), it might not matter so much. But I have a feeling such mutual understanding and respect is very rare.
6 comments:
It may be the case that there is absolutely nothing that someone who considers herself far to the left of President Obama can say that will be useful to you, but here goes anyway:
The description of liberals/Democrats/the left in your post is nothing like my beliefs, or the liberal friends I have, or the liberal opinion sources that I read.
I say this not to provoke a political debate with you (which debate I seriously doubt would be productive), but rather to suggest that you re-examine what people on the left believe and want to do. I'm sure you still won't agree with them, but at least you will know where they are actually coming from.
Hey Julie,
I'm not very interested in debating with people as I am in clarifying our differences. Good people can disagree.
The issues I brought up are those that my liberal friends and family members tell me are the most important to them (the income gap, health care, women's reproductive rights, gay marriage, climate change). Perhaps these are not the issues that are the most motivating to you. I'd be sincerely interested to know what yours are.
However, I still maintain that the differences between left and right are based largely on fundamentally different world-views, and will not be easily bridged, even when both sides thoroughly understand where the other is coming from.
Gabrielle, I agree with you on the issues that are important to liberals; I just disagree with your framing of these items as values in conflict with other values that conservatives hold in higher regard.
For example, you wrote:
"Environmental protection versus economic development, national security, and personal freedom?"
Environmental protection (specifically: responding to climate change) is one of the two most important issues to me. (The other, by the way, is increasing income inequality.)
The disagreement comes here: I don't see a conflict between environmental protection and the other items that you listed; I see environmental protection as the prerequisite to staying strong in the other items on your list.
Here is how I would analyze it instead:
Economic development: while no one weather event can be tied to climate change, things like recent droughts, fires, and hurricanes are the kinds of things that one expects to see more of in a warming world. The economic impact of these things are enormous. We can't protect our economic growth unless we protect our environment. It isn't an either/or to me; it is a both/neither.
National security: the military has actually been at the forefront of gaming out what kinds of things might happen as a result of climate change (such as migrations and then conflicts due to drought) and it will put incredible burdens on our military. It isn't an either/or to me; it is a both/neither.
Personal freedom: Again, no single weather event can be blamed on global warming, but I've already seen in my own family agricultural land destroyed by wildfires. That's a huge infringement of personal freedom that this person basically cannot use his land as he wants to due to the actions of others. Again, not an either/or but a both/neither situation.
Again, not looking to change your mind about anything, and certainly hoping to be nothing but respectful, but this liberal does not see the items you list as either/or situations where we are choosing one side over the other.
Hey Julie,
Climate change is a perfect example of the vast divide between left and right.
In the first place, most conservatives do not buy into the premise that catastrophic climate change is inevitable (or even likely), nor do most of us believe in the sole anthropogenesis of global warming.
Statistics can be slung back and forth, but the reality of the situation is that the science is not settled, and never can be when future projections and computer modeling of a complex system are necessary.
Therefore, from the very outset, the worldview of most leftists includes (to some degree or another) anthropogenic global warming leading to catastrophic climate change, whereas the worldview of most conservatives does not.
However, even assuming agreement on those premises, the approach favored by people on the left to finding solutions to these problems, is diametrically opposed to the approach taken by the right. People on the left tend to favor governmental policies and international edicts to organize and enforce behavioral change on citizens and nations from the top down.
People on the right tend to believe that free individuals working in a free market are far more likely to develop the kinds of technological advances that will enable humanity to adapt to changing conditions.
We believe policies such as cap and trade, even if they can be enforced fairly, will cause more human misery, particularly in developing nations, than climate change ever could.
We believe that the vast sums of money spent on domestic and international programs designed to lower carbon emissions would be far more productively used in other ways (or better yet, not used at all).
We believe that governmental focus on alternative energy sources, and resistance to developing and making use of our own domestic resources of oil, coal, etc., is preventing us from becoming energy independent.. We see this as a far more imminent threat to national security than hypothetical issues involving migrations or civil unrest which are not occurring, and may never occur.
We see laws such as those regulating what kinds of light bulbs we may or may not purchase and what kinds of cars we may or may not drive (to take two fairly trivial examples), as direct governmental infringement upon our personal freedom.
I absolutely understand and respect the fear and passion that people on the left feel over this issue. If I fully bought into it, I would feel similarly frightened. But even if I did, as a conservative, my instincts for how to solve these problems are fundamentally different from those of people on the left, which was my original point.
Gabby, you know how sometimes you read something written by an evangelical about "what Mormons believe" and you are left scratching your head? That's what I feel like when you tell me "what liberals believe." I'm tempted to engage you on the many things you have written in your last comment that bear no resemblance whatsoever to the liberal thought I see around me, but . . .
. . . your comments on climate change have made me realize that we are way, way too far apart on views of what is real for any further conversation to be likely to be productive, so I'll bow out here.
I admit to being surprised that anyone could look at the data that the military and business communities (see the recent Munich Re study, for example), not to mention scientists, are producing and conclude that climate change isn't a serious threat. It is one thing to say that you prefer smaller-gov't and market-based solutions to climate change; that's a reasonable place for people to disagree based on their ideologies. But to say that it either isn't happening or isn't a serious threat is to (1) dismiss what the US military is telling us, (2) dismiss what 97% of scientists are telling us, and (3) dismiss what the free market is telling us.
If you can give me a scenario under which the military, the academy, and the free market would conspire to spread inaccurate information on climate change, I will consider it, but I can't think of any scenario where that would be likely, so I can't take your objections seriously and therefore doubt there's anything more productive to say here.
So I'm going to wish you a happy day and end on that note.
Fair enough, Julie. The point of my original blog post was to highlight the wide divide between left and right, which was illustrated here. It is frustrating! Frustrating, because there are enough fundamentals that we do not agree on, to make productive debate really difficult.
Anyway, with regards to climate change, I've tried to stick with what I believe (or what most conservatives believe), since that is all I really know. I'm not sure what you mean by "the many things you have written in your last comment that bear no resemblance whatsoever to the liberal thought I see around me." The only statement I made in my last comment regarding beliefs of people on the left was that they favor governmental policies and international edicts to organize and enforce behavioral change on citizens and nations from the top down. Inasmuch as this inaccurately reflects your viewpoint, I am encouraged. :-)
My observations of what the left believes are based on the words I read and hear from individuals in the public light. Maybe the left suffers from the same plight as the right-- leadership that often seems incapable of effectively communicating liberal (or in my case, conservative) ideology.
I don't believe there is any conscious or organized "conspiracy" propagating fears of climate change. But the last hundred years have shown a pattern of scares similarly propagated by scientists, the media and lobbyists, which turned out either to be exaggerated, or simply inaccurate. An interesting book on this subject is "Scared to Death" by Christopher Booker and Richard North. There are interesting psychological and societal effects at play that can result in these kinds of dynamics in the absence of any organized conspiracy.
As to being surprised that someone can doubt that climate change is a serious threat given the overwhelming consensus of scientific thought, the following article outlines some of the reasons I am skeptical, if you are curious: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-scientific-global-warming-consensus-not/
I've read a number of books, articles and studies that throw doubt on the scientific "consensus." Let me know if you want any references. :-)
I hope you have a happy day, too. I AM encouraged when people like you and me, polar opposites on a particular issue (although I suspect we share a good many views in other areas), can engage in friendly conversation and stay friends. Life would be sad and boring, at least to me, if that were not possible, since I have quite a few friends and family members who differ from me politically.
Forgive me if I have come across as disrespectful, as that was not my intention.
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