Ted, What do you mean?
Start from scratch. List goals we can all agree on, such as confronting terrorism, creating equal opportunity for all citizens, making sure our children are educated properly, and making sure our health care system is the best in the world. After all, no reasonable person wants to foster terrorism, or apartheid, or a generation of undereducated kids, etc.
I am not so sure the goals are all that different although I think their priorities would be different. I also think there would be considerable divergence on what methods should be used to correct the problem.
For an example, the war on terror:
I would deploy the CIA to go underground like MOSSAD and fight terrorists cell by cell instead of fighting a costly and unwinnable war in Iraq. This nonsense that we fight the good fight on their turf is BS. You think the terrorists can't read English and aren't looking for a way to neutralize the intent behind that concept? That's what they were doing with 9/11. The only reason they haven't made a joke of that argument now is for the same reason why they commit terrorist attacks so infrequently in the world. They don't have the resources to do so......and not because we are fighting them in Iraq.
In a sense, Bush has turned them into the imaginery boogie men that we were afraid of as kids. And they are nearly as ineffectual.
Education:
I like the setting up of standards and assessment in NCLB, but I certainly do not think the punitive tactics behind the program are at all reasonable. If a school has a high percentage of kids flunking the WASL or the CA equivalent, the answer is not to shut it down but to find a way to help the school and its students get a better education. Bush's/the GOP's response is to shut down the school.....which btw isn't working. They tried to close a school in Oakland last Sept but they couldn't fine new places for the kids so the school is open on a month to month basis.
Part of the problem of course is that GOPers respond best to punitive measures........threatened with a strapping, or a loss of mall privileges, they will study their brains out. However, not all of us are wired that way.
I say maintain the standards and assessments, and when a school can not meet them, then use federal resources to get them over the hump. The GOP has to understand that not all kids are born equal......some come into this world with a lot of baggage and to expect them to do as well as those without that baggage is riculous.
Oil dependency:
The GOP solution is to drill the ANWR and CA coastline. I would opt for the Swedish, Icelander, Brazilian model.......conservation while exploring alternative resources.
The environment:
The GOP thinks the environmentalists are tree huggers. Because of their wiring, they don't get what environmentalists are getting.....that the ecology is in trouble. And its really as basic as that.........I think someone like you gets a little, but most GOPers think in some facsimile of a Coulter.......the earth is there for man to exploit. Every fiber in my gut tells me that that POV is as about as wrong as you can get.
The federal deficit:
Its a joke under Bush. I think that Clinton and the GOP Congress were on the right track, but Bush and the current GOP Congress have made that effort a mockery. I really don't know what to say about it other than I think this is symptomatic of a bigger problem; that is, the decline of the American culture which, if true, would be very hard for us to do anything about.
I would put the federal deficit, oil dependency and education on line 1; the rest on line 2 in order to delineate their importance.
What do you say?
Then let's calmly discuss how to get there. Free market? Government programs? Regulations, and where? This 2nd part, unfortunately, is where the polarization occurs, because every single one of us thinks we know what the best solution is. The truth is that no one does, so we could all stand to be a little more humble and a little more open in our beliefs.
Its because we think very differently.........I would say we are even wired differently. We also have very different starting premises. I think those differences in the past have been a good thing so long as one group didn't gain supremacy over the other. However, 9/11 changed all that.......and now the two different POVs are not in any kind of balance. I not sure that's correct but that's my take on why the problem is worsening.
And just for the record........the more it worsens, the more we dislike each other.
One last thing...........I think we are playing right into the hands of Osama bin Laden. |
