Regrets? I've Had A Few

Unlike Paul Anka, however, not too few to mention.



Is the singing of My Way still as ubiquitous at high school graduations as it was thirty-some years ago? Why? I think I may have stumbled upon a major cause of America's collective mental instability: we say we praise individuality and initiative, but we stomp down the truly creative and innovative at every turn. We publicly praise the iconoclasts amongst us, yet we collectively don't want anyone to be "too much" smarter than we are. We honor and reward some of the unique members of our society, but we hammer down most of them in small ways every day.

Is it an echo of the herd mentality of our ancestors? Most species which congregate in groups use the survival tactic of letting the group members who don't blend in be the main targets of the group's predators. The survival of the group matters more than the survival of any one individual group member.

Herein, too, lie the roots of Social Darwinism--for the individuals in a group who "stick out," who do not conform, are different in some easily identifiable way: they are old; they are sick; they are weak. Conservatives act like liberals are the bad ones in our society, but the logical end of much conservative thinking is euthanasia.

Which would horrify most conservatives if one brought this to their attention. Unfortunately for all of us, most people, liberal and conservative alike, do not bother themselves with the logical consequences of their expressed "thinking."

Even worse, reading many of the letters to the Editor of the Omaha World-Herald of late suggests that we've time-warped into George Orwell's 1984. Did you know, for example, that Democrats are the ones who don't tolerate anyone who disagrees with them? That Democrats run the media and control the spin on all the news we get, no matter its sources? That our starting the Iraq War was justified and is still a good thing? That tax breaks for the rich are good for all of us?

What's worst of all, many of these letter writers seriously think that "liberal" is a dirty word, and that liberals actively work to destroy the USA . . . not that liberals just have different ideas about what is best for our country.

I may be a lonely voice in the wilderness, but I am not ashamed of my stands on the issues. I came to them by thinking through the problems I see and determining what is the most practical, sensible solution. I did not start from any pre-conceived bias, liberal or conservative. For goodness' sake: I am the child of a true redneck (who was proud of it) and a Kennedy Democrat. Of course I can see things from all sides. It's how I was raised. I am just as angry at the radical left-wing as I am at the radical right-wing. Neither extreme has the best interests of the country in mind--only their own short-term advantage.

Just as the adversarial approach, in my opinion, is not the best way to run a legal system, it is not the best way to run a society. It only exacerbates the worst tendencies in all of us. We have to find a better way, or the future of America will be a bleak one, indeed.