Disparity of Common Sense

                                       

Often in the olden days, cartographers would mark the boundary of their then limited knowledge with the phrase “here there be dragons” as an ominous warning to anyone who would sail into the unknown beyond which lay past the map-maker’s understanding of his world. Soon, an intrepid few proved the tales of dragons a myth and the world took a step forward.

As humanity progresses, it has gone through many periods of “fearing the dragon” and followed them up with a progression forward. We always find a new way to mire ourselves in some foolishness just deep enough to hold us stuck for a while. Maybe it’s human nature. After all, it gives us something to move beyond. The illusion of progress, at the very least.

All that was just an introduction to my blog… sound and fury signifying very little. Well this is my space to talk about things that bother me, and this is the first one of many. So, what do I think we’ve mired ourselves in this time around, you must be asking yourself? Useless labels.

I know, that could refer to a great many things, each valid and silly in its own right. But the one in particular that’s been pestering me the most of late is our tendency to label people as “liberal” or “conservative”. Are most people even aware enough of the issues associated with these labels to use them to describe themselves safely?

I can really only offer up an example of what I mean to explain this further: earlier this week, I was in a rather lively discussion of politics (specifically, the issue of abortion had somehow arisen) and I observed, in what I confess was a less-than-polite way, that anyone who was hard-line liberal or conservative was a “fucking moron.”

Someone who I believe had considered themselves to be a hard-line conservative made an attempt to defend the pro-life as the only option mentality to me. It only took about 2 minutes for her to make the transition from “conservative hard-line” to “well, I’d get one if I was raped… I’m not having some psychopath’s baby”.

And let me tell you, I applaud her. In her mind, she progressed much further than either self-imposed label would have let her. She applied her own sense of logic to it and found the place where a compromise met her actual beliefs. This swings the other way, just so you don’t think I have a liberal bias. Liberals are simply notorious for quoting someone else to defend their stance instead of using their own sense of logic to do so.

Basically here’s what I’m saying: there is no issue on the planet with only two sides to it. So these labels? They’re useless and harmful. They’re the dragons of our day. I say it’s high time we slayed them.

-=Vic Veritas=-

“Only a fool is one thing. And that thing is a fool.” ~Clinton Jeter