The great divide

"Annoy a liberal: work hard and be happy!”

Maybe it’s not the crappiest bumper sticker I’ve seen this year, but it definitely makes the top-10 list.

Was it the sticker’s design I found annoying? No. The idea that Americans might be aspiring to hard work and happiness? Certainly not.

No, the really irritating thing about this particular bumper sticker was its raison d’etre: the idea that we should naturally have two opposing viewpoints on every subject.
As far as I’m concerned, striving for the good life through hard work is not an exclusively conservative concept. Before having the good fortune of coming across this sticker in my grocery parking lot, I had been unaware that fellow liberals supported sloth and misery.

His evident mentality of division is why I feel sorry for the man who thought slapping this sticker on his pickup truck was a good idea. He’s an unfortunate addict of the poisonous negativism cooked up by the likes of Karl Rove, although he has plenty of contemporaries across the partisan divide.

Political two-sidedness may be the mind set with which we evaluate some issues in our country. Of course, the lines are drawn fairly clearly on issues like abortion and whether or not the middle class will ever see a trickle of the monetary windfall supply-siders promised them.

However, approaching every issue with the mentality that conservatives will loathe what liberals love (and vise versa) is counter productive. Beneath all our differences, we have some common American values after all.

To aid partisans of all stripes, I’ve compiled a list of three basic issues that we all have in common, but are nonetheless often exploited for partisan gain.

1. Torture. With any luck, both presidential candidates will remain true to their word to end this disgraceful foray into inhumanity when one of them steps into the Oval Office in January. With John McCain representing the more traditionally conservative wing of American politics, hopefully he, himself a torture victim and a longtime anti-torture advocate, will be able to sway those in his party who have become convinced that abusing human rights is one of our government’s rights. But it’s not too late to return to the days when we believed in the equal treatment of all human beings.

2. Education. Better public education is a democratic necessity, and anyone who thinks we can seriously reduce funding for public education and remain a first-world country is seriously mistaken. For the health of our society, we should be debating how to educate, not whether to educate.

3. The environment. It’s possibly the greatest victim of political two-sidedness. Little could be more catastrophic than both ends of the political spectrum deciding that the way we treat our world should be reserved for fanatics. Extremists call for us to hug every tree or alternatively become enamored with strip mining and pollution. Responsible resource management isn’t liberal or conservative. It, like so many other issues, is for everyone who thinks we should leave future generations a livable place to call home.