COLUMN: Toning down the political rhetoric
Republicans are a horde of hive-minded Neanderthals who cling to religion for lack of having fully-formed higher reasoning or any form of true compassion, and thus are hawkish because they haven’t fully moved on from the crusades.
Libertarians are just fence-sitters because they love their drugs and money so they can’t pick a party that’s actually sizable enough to win many elections – but hey, maybe they’re stoned and rich enough not to mind.
Democrats are a bunch of soy latte-sipping idealists whose Priuses run on aborted fetuses and who are so open-minded their brains have actually fallen out.
Now, while those sorts of statements are always amusing to make in good fun, when we actually begin to believe these sorts of things about our fellows it’s only a matter of time before we stop listening to one another for good points. Sometimes people who we may not understand for wanting to carry an AR-15 like a security blanket can be completely reasonable when it comes to things like education funding. It may surprise you at first, but oddly enough, the other side thinks too, otherwise natural selection would have wiped them out a while ago.
Many times both sides can agree what the problem is and that there should be a solution; we as a society have a number of places where we compromise or see eye to eye. I mean, there are a tremendous number of things on which we can even agree on a general idea of where we should be headed; we just have different understandings of how we can get there. Being at the legislature this semester I’ve even gotten a front-row seat to watch discussions that illustrate this perfectly.
Everyone can agree that there’s a deficit because, well, numbers are numbers, statistics tend to be pretty universally convincing as they’re objective. The problem that’s been going on within Utah this round of budgeting has been that certain groups feel differently about how quickly we need to close the gap of that deficit. Some on both sides of the aisle are saying we need to do so in steps. The deficit didn’t get here in the space of a year, so trying to rid ourselves of it in one year will just end up hurting everyone more when we don’t really need to make this disappear in one sweep. There are others, though, who want to cut 7-10 percent of every program in the state across the board regardless of impact. While my wording may suggest how I feel about those two plans we’ll just clear up – I agree with the first set of people.
Here’s the important thing though: Nobody gets out of hand and decides it’s appropriate to call one side of the argument Communist, nor does anybody say the other group are a bunch of Nazis, and can’t we all be grateful for that? There are of course bills that come up in any legislature that I personally feel are just beyond the bounds of ridiculous, but it doesn’t mean that the person proposing them is suddenly no longer a human who deserves any level of respect in the course of my disagreeing with them.
Now it may sound like I’m simply copying the mantra of my dearly beloved Jon Stewart, but oddly enough I’ve genuinely felt this way for some time. I feel that any person who goes running about shouting that the other side is a bunch of mindless zombies should be thoroughly ignored. This is the primary reason I can’t stand people like Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh. If I ever get out of hand like those people, I’d hope someone would call me out on making no point. Hyperbole and ignorance get our discussion nowhere, they don’t educate the voting populace and they don’t get your point any traction – or at least they certainly shouldn’t. They simply get the other side red – or perhaps blue – in the face shouting back at you, and when everyone’s yelling, no one can hear.
Anna Jane Harris is a junior majoring in political science. She can be reached at anna.j.harris@aggiemail.usu.edu.