Fandango’s Provocative Question #197

Today questions asks if you can detach a person’s political beliefs from that person and see each separately.

In your interpersonal relationships with acquaintances, friends, and family, are you able to separate political ideologies from the people who hold them? Why or why not?

I’m not sure I have ever been able (or willing) to detach “political” opinions from the person who owns them. I believe an individual’s political values are intimately related to his or her core values. I don’t like socially mixing with people whose political views and values are antithetical to mine. I can’t get past the haunting question, “How can you see yourself as a good person when your politics show you as without compassion for the pain of others?”

I don’t see people as “segmented.” What you believe is a direct outgrowth of who you are and who you are is inevitably what you believe. Often, your professed “political beliefs” may display a deeper level of your core beliefs than anything else you are willing to discuss in a “public” way.

Your politics are more “you” than you know.

Let’s start with a couple of “small” things that say a lot about politics and core values.

About 12 years ago, we had to vote about whether or not to raise the funding on our library. Our library in little old Uxbridge was the first free library in the country. That is one of our few claims to fame. The library was built in 1882. In its day, it was state of the art. It’s a beautiful building and one of the crowning achievements of our town. Over the years, its funding has dried up to the point that we are barely able to keep the library open enough hours to have it stay part of the national library system.

It’s also too small. They no longer can accept books — even for free — because they are out of shelf space.

Libraries are not only places to borrow books. They are quiet places where kids can study away from noisy and chaotic homes. Libraries offer free wi-fi. Some homes lack the connection (it’s expensive) or have far less than they need. Libraries are places where new authors can tell people about books they’ve written, where there’s a story hour for the little ones, where kids can discover books. Where anyone can sit and read in peace and safety. They also give courses at night for families and individuals. Free.

Funding the library so we could afford a full-time librarian and a second part-timer would have cost about $5 per home per year. It was a small enough amount so you’d think this would be a no-brainer. Yet, there was a lobby against it. “Who needs a library anyway?” was the clarion call. The answer is everyone needs a library sometimes and some people need it more than others. Poorer people need it most, but anyone who takes studying seriously will need it sometimes.

The bill went down to defeat. I was shocked. It never occurred to me that people would be against having a good library especially since we (so to speak) invented the free public library. How can you be against books? Yet they were.

The library is still alive. Private donations keep it running, but not enough to help it expand. It’s exactly the same size as it was in 1882. The politics of the town displayed their heart as more Grinch than Santa. As for me, if you are against books, you are unlikely to be my friend.

Okay, here’s another one. There is a sewage plant in Millbury (a slightly larger town than Uxbridge, just up the road) where they still poured raw sewage into the Blackstone River. For an additional 50 cents a month per home, they could repair the plant and stop polluting the river.

Millbury refused. That was 10 years ago. Times have changed and they may have (by now, I hope) been forced to stop polluting. When that bill was defeated, almost everyone in the valley was shocked. That they were still, after all these years of working to clean up the river, pouring sewage into it was shocking, but to be unwilling to stop polluting for such a small amount of money was, even to the dullest of our citizens, embarrassing. But they said no. Apparently $6 a year was too much to pay for clean water.

There are issues that are complicated — immigration, for example — but refusing to allow the children born here to remain is sickening. Those “dreamer” kids have never known any other country. They didn’t come here on their own nor did they ask to be born on the U.S. How we deal with incoming aliens is different, but this one is simple. How can you throw these young people out when this is the only place they know? How mean-spirited can you be?

Most of our political issues, after you cut through the propaganda, are matters of basic compassion, empathy, and caring. If you think you are a Christian, how can you not care? If you are a human being with a conscience, how can you not care?The real political bottom line is how you treat fellow human beings. I don’t think you need to be religiously-committed to have an understanding of right and wrong, but a surprising number of people don’t get it. I don’t know what happened to them to make them so callous and cold, but personally, I want nothing to do with them.

They probably don’t like me, either.

Categories: #BlackstoneRiver, #Books, #FPQ, #Photography, Mumford River, Provocative Questions, questions, reading, right and wrong, Water

Tags: #FPQ, #Photography, Fandango's Provocative Question, Marilyn Armstrong, Politics and core values