I Feel Your Pain: an Open Letter from an Unabashed Liberal to All Conservatives
December 28, 2003. The term “liberal” is not one I would use to describe myself, yet it is how Republicans of my acquaintance commonly label me. Therefore, especially because the term distances me from so many “conservative” beliefs I find distasteful, I have chosen to embrace the liberal label and use it proudly.
Who am I? While I have come to be thoroughly Unamerican, I was born an ordinary American—staunchly middle class. My parents and siblings and I had to work hard for everything we had: our suburban home, our family car, and our school tuition, books, and fees. We kids had the job of doing as well in school as we could, and our mother worked outside the home long before it was popular—and I remember neighbors and family members screaming at her for it, as if she loved us less by providing the extras in life we couldn't otherwise have afforded or by allowing us the independence and responsibility of being latchkey kids a few decades before the term came into vogue.
What do I want? A fair chance for everyone: not just myself but for those around me. Even those who have less money or education than I have ... or those with different-colored skin or sexual preferences and so on and so forth. I want men and women to be able to compete—or, preferably, cooperate—on a level playing field. I want people with more money to be able to buy more “stuff” but not more influence. I want people without money to have access to a standard of education and health care that even wealthy people would gladly accept for themselves and their loved ones. I want every American citizen to have access to a job that pays a living wage for a forty-hour workweek. I want all Americans to have the upward mobility to make life better for themselves and their families. I do not believe in handouts for the rich or the poor; nor do I want to offer blanket benefits to anyone who simply arrives on our shores. I want all Americans, no matter how they look or what they think, to have the freedom to determine how they shall live without being dictated to. I want all Americans to have the opportunity to pursue happiness without feeling that they must resort to victimhood or discrimination to get ahead.
For these beliefs, I have been tarred with the epithet “liberal,” as if my simple plea for egalitarianism somehow makes me evil or stupid.
Yet, to those who would eschew me for my beliefs, let me say this: I feel your pain.
When I watch you on TV, listen to you on the radio, read your writings in the papers, or chat with you over a cup of coffee at the office water cooler, I perceive how threatened you feel ... how defensive. Perhaps I can lay some balm on those wounds you've been nursing—at least, I will try.
In you, I see someone who perceives that his or her own rights are necessarily diminished whenever society extends those same rights to those who have been treated as second-class citizens in the past. I see men who feel their rights are threatened whenever women exercise their own rights or abilities; I see whites who resent society's insistence on Black equality; I see heterosexuals and homophobics who feel threatened whenever any human rights are extended to gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transexuals, and those of ambiguous sexuality. Your words and actions make you appear honestly to believe that you—and/or those you accept as being enough like you—are the only entities on the planet that qualify as “human” and that everyone else is a lesser child of God.
In you, I see someone who perceives that the world is a place of plenty: because we've had oil flowing freely for the past several decades, oil will always flow freely. Because there have always been breathable air and drinkable water, there always will be. Since God has always told us that the planet is ours to conquer and subdue, the planet will always be there with infinite resources to answer not only our needs but our wants—it is just not humanly possible to foul the earth beyond repair; therefore, those who even worry about such things are pessimists or fools ... the concept of reducing, reusing, and recycling is an imaginary construct concocted by tree-hugging weirdos to annoy and guilt-trip normal people like you. Because you personally have always had whatever you needed—food, shelter, clothing, money, jobs, cars, vacations, luxuries—then “poor” is merely a relative term ... nobody anywhere is really THAT poor or THAT hungry ... since you can't imagine it, they must be exaggerating it—or they must somehow deserve their fate. If you and yours are safe and well fed, then let everyone else eat cake.
In you, I see someone who perceives the world in the context of us-versus-them. Anyone you can identify with qualifies as “us”; everyone else is “them.” In this case, “us” is usually male, often middle-aged or older, and almost always white; “them” typically includes women (especially feminists), Blacks, non-heterosexuals ... anybody with a “different” religion, be it Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, or Jew ... foreigners ... liberals ... people with a grossly different income from yours ... or anybody who just plain looks different, seems different, or thinks differently from you in some way you find significant.
In you, I see someone who perceives scarcity of money ... and you perceive every layabout or litigator as wanting a piece of yours. If you could own all the money that ever was or would be printed, would it be enough?
In you, I see someone who is either unwilling or unable to feel someone or something else's pain ... and I see someone who resents and feels threatened by me because I can and do sympathize and empathize so freely.
I can see why you are so uncomfortable with the world the way it is now. The world you perceived as you were growing up seemed so much simpler—so much more orderly. I can tell you: liberals share this perception with you—there's something we have in common. If you are a middle-aged or older white male, chances are that you were firmly and repeatedly taught to believe that you were superior to those around you—especially women and people of color. The world revolved around you. You were taught that the world was your oyster and that it was not only your right but your responsibility to bend it to your desires ... to kill its animals and use its resources as you in your innately unerring judgment saw fit. Parents, teachers, churches, society, and the media reinforced these messages constantly. What an ego boost it must have been—with an allure that only the most sensitive, educated, honest, and intelligent individuals could resist—to have been told that you were worth more than other people simply because you had this skin and not that or because you had these genitalia and not those ... to have been expressly taught that you were worthy of having anything your heart desired if you but reached out your hand and grasped it. Then, as you entered adulthood, things changed ... the world became more complicated (again, not just for conservatives but for everybody) ... and people suddenly began to tell you that you are evil—that you are responsible for all their problems—because of your skin and your genitalia ... and that this species or that species has gone extinct, that the landfills are overrunning the forests and fields, that the water and air are riddled with pollution, that the oil is running out, and that the planet is doomed—and all living things with it—if we don't practice conservation. The world no longer revolved around you.
How horrible these realizations must be! How much easier to live in denial that these other points of view have any merit than to stop and think for a moment that the convenient, comforting platitudes ingrained in you from childhood could possibly be wrong. How much safer—how much more secure—to pretend that things still are as they have always been. I wish I could convince you that granting rights to everybody strengthens everybody's rights (there can be no justice whenever there is injustice). I wish I could convince you that, with just a little creativity and imagination, a finite world can be just as beautiful—even profitable—as an infinite one. I wish I could convince you that people matter more than money ... that everyone does better when everyone does better ... that you don't need more than you need ... and that avarice enslaves those who seek for their own excesses money that can only be supplied from others' basic survival needs. I wish I could convince you that self-importance is superfluous and that self-righteousness is anything but righteous. I wish I could convince you that some changes are good and that the world would be a better place if you could just let go of your socialized superiority ... if you would take the mask off and be authentic. I wish I could convince you that the world will not fall apart if you allow yourself to feel insecure instead of denying your doubts with every waking breath. I wish I could convince you that the Chinese are right for equating “crisis” with “opportunity” in their language. I wish I could convince you that it is more rewarding to lead progress than to stymie it. I wish I could convince you of how much more connected you would feel to everything around you if you could only learn to feel someone or something else's pain. I wish I could convince you that, when you learn to feel others' pain, you also learn to share their joy.
I believe that the unarticulated inner conflict between “what was” and “what is” drives the relentless aggression I see in today's conservatives. I believe that they are hyper-defensive because they know in their hearts that their deepest fears—that all people are equal, that the earth's resources are finite, that they are not specially favored by God just because of skin, genitalia, or wealth—are true. I believe that they tremble inwardly because they know they are living on borrowed time; they are fighting tooth and nail to stave off the inevitable. I believe that these people are terrified because they can half-visualize the systematic destruction of their world view and their way of life.
While I disagree with their beliefs and priorities, I can't blame them for being so upset. Can you?
The writer, Zoe Owens, Ph.D., is a philosopher and author of such introspectively religious works as “Jesus Holy Christ Almighty.”
