the rebel

If you are someone who feels very strongly about your ideology -- and you are certain about your words when you call yourself liberal or conservative without doubt -- why do you feel so strongly? Why do you firmly place yourself on one side or the other? I propose, at least in a political or greater societal sense, that you feel so strongly because you believe your side to have the best plan for improving people's lives. You probably believe that if your conservative or liberal values were accepted by more people, the country or world would be a better place.

But if that is the case, let us look at that reasoning. Notice that your basis for feeling so strongly is the manner of achieving the goal and not based on the goal itself. Aside from a few crazy liberals on the far left who would like to see the country embrace widespread nudism and 'free love,' and a few crazy conservatives on the far right who don't care about the rest of the world so long as they don't have to pay taxes, everyone's goals are the same: to increase happiness in our country and in our world. That goal is almost universal. It is only our methods of achieving that goal that are conflicting, yet we stupidly argue as if we have different goals.

I write this partially as an explanation of why I'm a 'moderate' and partially because I have many good friends on both sides of the spectrum who are good people. I can say that I know the hearts of many people on both sides and that I know them to have good intention. I have very few friends whose beliefs are not based on good intention (these exceptions are due to selfishness), and so in this context the only distinctions between the radical socialist and the Catholic youth group leader are their beliefs about the best ways to act in order to manifest in life these identical intentions.

My overall point here is simple. In arguments over how the government and our society should work, remember that neither conservatives nor liberals want to see poverty in the United States, both would like to end hunger and increase happiness, and that all that really divides us is our way of achieving these goals.