When a threshold is crossed it cannot be uncrossed. When we have a life experience it cannot be un-exerienced. We can’t unhappen 9/11. We can’t erase WWII from our cultures, and we can’t stop the world from offering us a progressive series of more tomorrows. No one knows what significant experiences will happen tomorrow… but I know that whatever does happen will influence the beliefs of all those who experience it.
We all live in information bubbles; small spheres of personal experience outside of which everything appears distorted. The republican information bubble is more agressive, but democrats live inside one as well. All of us do.
A politician’s mother dies, and one such bubble bursts. He suddenly has an awakening to the benefits of a strong Medicaid system. A young libertarian reporter gets placed on the night shift police beat at an inner-city station, and through that experience starts to become more progressive in his beliefs about incarceration and crime prevention. A prominent, republican sponsor of the Defense of Marriage Act – who also happens to be a father – accepts that his son is gay, and that his son ought to have the same civil liberties and social benefits afforded straight people in this county. Once you have an experience you can’t go back. It changes you.
Even republican senators.
When it comes to which came first, the political belief or the experience it’s this: for democrats it’s the experience, and for republicans it’s the political belief. Excluding matters of war, you rarely, if ever, see a democrat push one of their beliefs more to the right after having a direct experience with an issue, whereas you almost always see a republican become more progressive after experiencing direct contact with the same issue.
We gotta get republicans out of the bubble more often. Inside their bubbles everything is given a nice rainbow sheen, but forward movement cannot happen if they keep running around inside a frictionless sphere – seeing a warped version of the outside word and always admiring the glitter of their own reflections. Hamsters with big egos.
The story for the day is that Senator Rob Portman bravely supports gay marriage. Senator Rob Portman got out of the “gay marriage will cause the sky to rain with fire” republican bubble. (One hopes he can help some of his friends burst that bubble as well.) Republican policy is clear: the only true marriage is straight marriage. One man, one woman. The progressive policy is one more along the lines of civil liberties, and that when the Declaration of Independence says that we all have the right to the “pursuit of happiness” then that includes who and how we all decide to love.
The saddest part (besides the costs of most weddings) is that both political positions are the same: freedom and civil liberties demand people be able to marry anyone they darn well please. Brave libertarians seem to get that. Once again, though, religious originations via the republican establishment have forgotten about the separation of church and state… hard rule to follow that is.
Why republicans who wrap themselves in the American flag and say that they are the party of freedom are demonstrating that they are standing atop Hypocrite Mountain is not the point of this article. The point is – once again – that one’s experiences shape one’s beliefs, and therefore what is achievable policymaking in Washington, DC.
I often joke that every high school in the United States should have a mandatory year abroad in their sophomore year. Kids from California should be forced to uproot and move in with a host family in Alabama. Alabama kids should go to Detroit. Floridian students should leave Florida and go to school any place back here on Earth. It’s perfectly acceptable to love your home, but for that love to prevent experiencing something else that is equally a part of you, your country citizenship, is not a practice that’s workable in the long term for a country that struggles daily to find a simple majority… among 300 million people.
On a side, yet somewhat applicable note, I had absolutely no idea that I had racially biased thoughts until I was 11 and my family moved to a state that actually had some diversity. I lacked the experience of anything other than what I knew, my bubble, which was white, midwest suburbia. I was taught that judging people by how they look is bad, and that all people are equal, and peace is good, and stealing is bad, and crime doesn’t pay, fairness and justice above all else, and 2 plus 2 doesn’t always equal 4…. but I had no direct experiences to support any of those assertions. I was just a white kid in a white neighborhood of a white city in a middle class family. Like everyone, this kid required more direct experiences just to discover that the biases even existed – didn’t even know I was in so many bubbles (and likely still unaware of how many more I still inhabit). Had I not gotten outside of that particular middle-America bubble… I bet I would be a republican who agreed with Paul Ryan a lot due to a lack of experiences teaching me otherwise (shudder, throw salt, spit, and knock on wood).
We all live in a bubble… not just the far right extremists. We like in a bubble of our own direct experiences. It doesn’t necessarily make us bad. We’re only bad people if we don’t accept the lessons our experiences are intended to teach. When we learn something new, we tend change what we believe. As such we are forced against the brick wall that defines Conservatism: opposing change. That’s what the word means. Opposing change can only be achieved by stopping change at its source: learning something new. Refuse to learn, refuse to change, and therefore refuse to improve. Idealistic conservatism makes it impossible to improve society.
Senator Rob Portman couldn’t not experience his son being gay. He can’t just turn the other way like a forced vaginal probe. Once he experienced what it’s like to love someone, his son, who also just happens to be gay… his belief on the issue changed. A sponsor of DOMA, Rob Portman’s life path forced him – a man whose job it is to prevent change in policies policymaking – to cross a threshold that cannot be uncrossed.
Everyone has been calling Senator Portman brave because in accepting that his son ought have the same civil rights as everyone else; he is going against a major pillar of the Republican Party platform. I think he’s just being human. The more we experience, the more we learn, the more we grow. The world continues to move around the sun, and we all change just a little bit.
That anyone who grows up in this country actually wants to be part of a political party that is defined by stopping progress, preventing experiences and therefore learning – wanting that as a governing policy mystifies me. But like everyone, I clearly have a lot more to learn.
Published: by | Updated: 06-30-2014 11:18:29
