I have been reading (too many) right-wing materials in an attempt to understand where they are coming from. Obviously, there is no “one” point of view, but there are a few things that seem to be common. Some things that keep coming up are calls for “smaller government”, “fewer regulations”, and “elimination of taxes”. Mixed in with that are a bunch of other topics including such things as “include (Christian) religion in all government activities”, “provide government funding to private schools, and “outlaw abortions.”

It is my observation that in most cases the folks on the right don’t really mean what they are saying. For example, they would like to eliminate environmental regulations so that they can take freely from “the commons” without having to worry about spoiling the neighbor’s environment (in the broad sense of every being a neighbor). However, this is only desirable if there are sufficient regulations to prevent a company from trashing their neighborhood. It is one thing to be able to poison a river down stream from your operation, but it is entirely a different thing to have your water supply poisoned and “your” fish killed by someone else. It is one thing to be able to pump unlimited amounts of water to irrigate your crops, but an entirely different thing when neighbors pump the water out of “your” (shared) aquifer so that your crops die. This sort of logic expands to almost everything. When they want protection, they want government. When they want to take as much as they can for as little as they can, they don’t want government. Let me do whatever I want, but protect me from what others do to harm me.

This expands to other areas, such as health care. Many agricultural families and rural folks don’t want government funded health care (Obama care?) because they don’t want to pay taxes for someone else’s health care, and frequently they don’t need it because their wife works for the government (State, university, local government, etc.) which provides the family with free health care. This isn’t just happening in the rural areas, it happens everywhere including folks that work for a large corporation that pays the insurance bill. I understand this, sort of. However, the reality is that there are many, many people who do not work for the government or large corporations and therefore don’t get free health care. These people can’t afford insurance, so they don’t get it. Besides, even if you could afford the insurance, why buy it? – if I need medical care the government will always provide it for free. Instead they put off health maintenance (preventative care), and get their health care from emergency rooms. This ends up costing the tax payers (including those opposed to government supported insurance) many times as much as it would cost to take care of their health care. If you just look at costs and dollars, it is vastly less expensive for everyone to have a centralized payment scheme along the lines of Obama Care. It is not only less expensive for the “society everyone”, it is also less expensive for each “individual everyone.”

I think almost all of us want a clean/safe environment, high quality inexpensive health care, excellent schools, good roads, etc. Not only that, but I think everyone knows that it costs something to get these things, and everyone knows that it requires an effective government to manage it. There are some things that we might not agree upon, such as outlawing abortion. But even those aren’t so clear cut. In the 1950’s and 1960’s when abortion was outlawed, there was a really high number of young ladies that were killed and/or severely injured from amateur abortions. Many young ladies crossed the boarders to Mexico or other countries seeking abortions, which often ended in catastrophe. It got so bad that the public finally rose up and demanded that the laws be changed so that women had an opportunity to get safe abortions instead of dying from the botched attempts. The idea was that it was far better to provide for rare, but safe, abortions than to continue on the path that was created by outlawing the practice. It was a pragmatic approach to a serious and deadly problem that had become common in the “middle class” (“white”) homes across the nation. It is important to note that nobody was mandating abortions, nobody was forced to do anything against their will or their religion. The current push to outlaw abortions isn’t with making people do anything that they don’t want to do, it is about making other people do things that the other doesn’t want to do. The laws allowing for safe abortions also didn’t (and don’t) result in more abortions than were being performed illegally, it merely reduced the amount of harm being done to the women.

In summary, I think we are all pretty much in agreement about what we want in our Country. We want a balance between “unfettered freedom” and protection from what happens with unfettered freedom. We want everyone to pay their own way as best as they can, and we want to minimize the costs of supporting those that can’t.

A common thread that I keep finding in my research into right-wing literature is a complaint that the “liberals” are at fault because they have failed to stop the right wing folks from destroying things. For example, I commonly see descriptions of devastating pollution events (spills into rivers, screwed up wells, etc) as being a failure of “the government” and “the liberals” from stopping the “conservatives” (not conservationists) from creating these spills. They realize that the perpetrator of the spill was trying to save money and therefore just dumped into the environment. That is apparently their right to do. However, the liberals are at fault because either the liberals (or nasty “environmentalists”) failed to stop them from doing that, or more damningly, they failed to clean up the mess before it impacted the community because there was insufficient resources to do the cleanup.

An interesting example are the large open gold mines in the desert run by large corporations to extract gold cheaply as possible. They mound up huge piles of “ore”, sprinkle it with a cyanide laced water system that dissolves the gold. The cyanide/gold solution is stored in large open ponds. All this just happens to be on some of the main migratory bird flyways and a surprise to all, the birds land in the ponds and dye. That is just dead birds, no problem. But of course the water also seeps into the ground water and poisons the local wells along the way. Eventually the mine runs out and the company leaves, leaving the process of cleaning up their mess to the government (taxpayers) for decades into the future. I don’t think “conservatives” want this sort of thing to happen, but it seems to be the “duty” of industry to try to move as much of the costs of their actions into the public domain as possible so that the public picks up the costs of the damage that they do, instead of the industry. That approach is much more profitable than preventing the problems in the first place. It happens with roads and infrastructure in new subdivisions, it happens in oil drilling and fracking, it happens in the lumber industry, chemical industries, agriculture, semiconductor industry, etc. , etc. It seems that everywhere you look “industry” tries to get all that they can, leaving the cost of the damage created to the public to pay.

This brings me to the point of the story. The “right wing” folks want the same things as the “left wing” folks. However, they seem to believe that it is their “right” (maybe “obligation”) to push as hard as possible to do it anyway they want to increase profits by taking as much from “the commons” (resources owned and shared by everyone) as possible. They can do this because they are confident that the other side will do everything that they can to prevent them from damaging the commons. It is like a giant game of tug-of-war, with the right trying to take as much as they can, and the left trying to protect as much as they can. This might result in some sort of dynamic equilibrium, but at great cost to the environment and the public good. The balance of power is with on the right because that is where most of the money is concentrated.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to perform an “experiment” where instead of deciding what sort of “freedoms” and “taxes” we want to struggle over, we talk to each other to figure out what we jointly want and what they should be like. For example, do we want good schools for our children? If so, what does that mean? What would “good” look like? Perhaps we can come to an agreement about that – if so, maybe we could then figure out how to do it – together. Another example might be about what we want for our environment, and what does that look like? Then maybe we can figure out together how to get that done.

Some perhaps thornier problems involve “freedom” of beliefs (including religious beliefs). If I understand it properly, freedom to have your own religious beliefs was a big deal at the beginning of this Country. Does freedom to have your own religious beliefs mean that only if your religious beliefs happen to be the same as mine, or does it mean we each get to have that right – even though I am a Buddhist and your are a Hindu (or whatever)? It is my opinion that it applies to each person’s beliefs – and that we don’t “shame” or otherwise force otherwise to practice their beliefs when they don’t align with mine. Apparently this is a complicated and important issue for many – I don’t exactly know why, but it sure gets a lot of angry confrontations. We keep hearing that this is a “Christian Country” based upon what I don’t know about. As far as I can determine, we are a Country that was created upon the proposition that we are free to believe in whatever religion we want (but the practice of the religion needs to conform with the laws of the land). I don’t understand why we can’t be agnostic in public places, and religious in private ones. Maybe we can come of mutually agreeable definitions of a few terms, perhaps “God” would be one that is agree to mean whatever you want it to me, either a big guy in white robes, or “energy”, “the great unknown”, or whatever form applies to a wide variety of religions, included none in which case maybe it just means something like “everything.” But even that should be easily negotiable because I think everyone’s desire is to be allowed to have whatever beliefs work them them, and to practice without interference (as long as that practice isn’t causing harm to anyone or anything thing). The sticky point seems to be when one person wants to force another person to pay attention to their belief. What to do about Christmas? I think it is Santa Claus (no-religion) with private additions as suitable – I see no reason to object to anyone’s displaying important things, as long as they are done so as a matter of personal belief and not the Country’s (Government’s) belief. We should be able to agree upon symbols that are acceptable to all.

What would happen if we decided to work together to find the best approach for understanding and achieving the “common good?” Are we strong enough to do that? Are we compassionate enough? Do we have the energy to do it? Are we civilized enough? Can we talk to neighbors with curiosity, wondering what it is important to them and curious about what is really important to ourselves? Can we share, compromise and find common ground? Once we do that, can we find ways to accept, and deal with, those areas that really are differences?