On Being a Liberal

Generally speaking, I'm a big believer in nurture over nature, but that doesn't do anything to explain how someone like me, with as conservative an upbringing as you can imagine, turned out a liberal. Unless of course you really do believe that Sesame Street has more power than anyone ever dreamed. To be honest, though, I wasn't all that keen on the non-Muppet parts of that show, and when the carefully-constructed multiethnic human cast showed up to teach us all about the wonders of sharing, I usually went to get a juice-and-cookies refill. So I don't think they're responsible.

I did have an early exposure to Free to Be You and Me, but I don't remember getting any of the free-love hippie tree-hugging "messages" at the time, just grooving to the psychedelic animation sequences. No, I don't think that was it.

Something in my genetic makeup may in fact be responsible. For whatever reason, I seem to have been born with a stubborn attachment to the idea of "fairness," that no one could ever persuade me to turn loose of. Faced with a stupidity or an inequality, I would exclaim "That's not fair!" and no one could ever come up with a good enough rejoinder to change my mind. I mean sure, people accuse you of whining, or they say something dumb like "Hey, life isn't fair," but that's not really an answer. If they could actually show me that something was fair and I just didn't get the whole picture, well that was different. But most of the time they couldn't.

The truth is, most people give up on fairness---or as it's sometimes called, justice--much too soon. They run into a situation that isn't fair that they can't resolve, and they give up. "Life isn't fair, might as well take care of myself," they decide, and that's that. And nothing ever gets better. To me, that sums up a lot of conservatism.

"Ouch!" you say. "That's not conservatism!" Well, not to everyone. But the conservatism a lot of people practice comes pretty darn close. It's a sort of conservatism by default, something that is actually much closer to denial, and it is based in a powerful combination of fear, despair, and cynicism.The world's problems are enormous, beyond the power of any one person to solve. This fills us with despair, especially when we consider that even the most well-meaning people have not been able to solve them, and have sometimes even made them worse. We have all joined causes full of enthusiasm, only to get discouraged as the changes we wanted proved much more difficult to accomplish than we expected.

So a lot of us become cynical. We say things like "All politicians are corrupt. People never change. Things are the way they are because of human nature."

Well, yes, and no. There are occasional principled politicians, or at least politicians who can be forced into doing something principled. And people do change, though they can be dreadfully slow about it. Less than 100 years ago, women in this country had no right to vote, even after decades of struggle and protest. Educated men (and worse, women) wrote long pieces in influential magazines and newspapers about why women didn't really need, and would never get, that right, about how we could never expect to win that fight. But we kept fighting anyway, and we won. We didn't win until 1920, we won by an extremely slim margin, but we won. And the world is a better place for it. No educated person in the western world writes articles anymore about how women don't need a vote of their own. The subject doesn't even come up. People--or at least their attitudes--were changed. Permanently.

History is full of moments like this, times when changes for the better were pushed through, just as much as it has moments when the bad guys won. It's just as narrow-minded to see only the failures of progressive thinkers as it would be to see only their successes.

The truth, the hard truth, is that change is difficult. It requires sacrifices by people who may not live to see the benefits of what they do. But then, we all are beneficiaries of the actions of people who came before us. We can, if we like, choose to enjoy those benefits and contribute nothing towards future generations. We can use up the earth's natural resources, allow social problems to worsen, look on complacently as freedoms erode, assuming that we'll likely be dead before most of those chickens come home to roost. If we are fundamentalist Christians, we can decide to cop out, take comfort from those who tell us the Rapture is coming soon, that this world is a sinking ship, that there is nothing that can be done except to protect ourselves and our loved ones from the evil that is all around us.

But to Christians who hold on to this belief I have a warning: remember the Parable of the Talents. You know that one?. A rich man gives gold coins to his servants while he goes away on a trip. Two of the servants invest the money he leaves them, and create more wealth. They are rewarded. One servant buries his gold in a field, adding nothing to what he was given. He loses what he buried, and is cast out.

When I read this parable as a kid I thought it was unfair. After all, hadn't that servant been obedient, too, and protected his master's gold? Hadn't he observed the letter of the law? Well, yes. But he had not contributed anything. He had taken and given nothing back, contributed nothing, failed to make anything of the resources he was given. And it wasn't enough. And sitting on your behind while the world falls apart, if you're a Christian--well, I have the feeling that if your master does come back, he's not going to think much of you, frankly. I mean, why would God put you here at all if you're not going to make a positive difference in the world? What good are you, after all? You're just taking up air.

And if you're not religious, well, maybe being motivated to add something good to the world is a little more complicated. Perhaps it would help to remember, as I mentioned above, that what we enjoy today is the result of hundreds of years of effort by others. And whether you believe in a God who can judge your actions or not, as an ethical human being, maybe you can consult your own conscience on the matter.

We all get, what 60-80 years, maybe a little more if we're lucky, a lot less if we're not. At the end of whatever time we have, will we be able to look back on our lives and feel like our presence made any difference whatsoever? If all we do is preserve ourselves and our loved ones--if we never make any effort to go beyond that, to affect the world at large for the good--well, what good were we, after all?

What I'm trying to say is that I consider myself a liberal, a progressive, because I think there's a lot of work to be done, still, to make the world better. I'm grateful, incredibly grateful, for the work of those before me who have given me democracy, gender equality, civil rights, freedom of speech. I would like to be part of something like that, to expand those good things in the world, make them more available. To contribute to other things, to social justice, to an end to poverty, to making healthcare available to everyone, to making hunger a distant memory. To stopping pollution and preserving the astonishing biological diversity of this planet. To decreasing violence and warfare. None of these battles will be won in my lifetime, but if I'm determined, if I make the best use of my gifts, I might be able to contribute a little bit.

It seems only fair.