What a beautiful country we live in!
The other day, the old galoot found himself out in the bright afternoon sun, putting up some hopefully worthwhile signs along Hwy. 51 when our young state representative came walking up and offered to help.
Tongue in cheek?
We talked for a while and I offered we do a selfie. He thought about it but said it’d probably not reflect well with the hardcore members of his party. I told him I understood.
Outside of the continuing genuine camaraderie we renewed that afternoon, our conversation resulted in his expression of willingness to meet his opponent in at least a couple of what I proposed as multi-person discussions or “Issues Forums” at apolitical venues around the district in the coming weeks.
They may only come off as traditional two-person debates — which would be a shame — but still they offer an opportunity for us all to find out a little bit of how their views on important issues may differ or possibly even converge.
That’s a pretty good thing. For all of us. If we want to really do our jobs as citizens to vote on the basis of information rather than party gamesmanship.
Both these folks are good people. I sincerely believe they both are thoughtful about their beliefs and their decision-making. But, hey, they’re human beings, like all of us. We all get input that’s sometimes incomplete, mistaken or purposefully wrong and we filter that “data” through our personal preconceptions and emotions.
That’s why talking is good. Not just defending our points of view, but actually conversing calmly, without judgment or preconception while we honestly open ourselves up to other differing points of view.
It’s kind of a learning journey.
And if you think that the opposite of learning is ignorance, it’s a journey toward freedom — freedom from ignorance, freedom from unreasoning fear; freedom from “laws” or prohibitions either self-imposed or otherwise which prevent us individually and collectively from doing what we can and must to lift ourselves up.
Hey, you might even call that individual and collective learning struggle or path a “freedom road.”
It’s really pretty much a lifelong struggle for us individually and it’s been a generations long struggle for us political polities and nations.
And, if you permit the old guy to wax philosophical on you here, you could say it’s even like the journey we as human beings have always had the itch to take regarding our spiritual faith.
The broader our learning, the more we open ourselves up from unreasoning fear and preconceptions, the clearer we can see, the freer we become and the more we’re lifted up with that knowledge.
The beauty of it is that if you look down both those paths, they pretty much converge.
If we open ourselves to learning about anything and everything, without fear and preconception, we’re going to be free to engage with others openly and objectively and guess what.
We’re going to be able to trash can the boogeymen and solve most, if not all the real and humongous problems we share in this polity of ours.
As we offered to Bryant and Carl, I’d offer to all of us the invitation to sit down here together under this old River Tree to begin — or continue — that mutual journey of learning which will carry us inexorably onward and upward for us all.
