Intolerance

They are the best neighbors in the world. Always ready with a tool, an ingredient or a jump-start for the car. Whatever you need, if they have it, they will give it. They are a lovely family: husband, wife and four smart, funny, polite children. I was sure they were Democrats.

-Diana Wagman

Ah, the solipsism of a stereotypically intolerant liberal. The personal is political; the political is personal. All good people follow the herd. Homogeneity is king.

As the husband sat down in our living room with his drink, he announced, “The tea party is not racist.” We just looked at him. “The tea party is not racist,” he continued, “because I am a member of the tea party.”

I laughed. I thought he was joking, but he quickly made it clear he was not. He is white and his wife is African American. And they belong to the tea party. They don’t care who becomes our next president as long as it isn’t Barack Obama. The conversation devolved from there until he was shouting, I was shouting, his wife was trying to calm him down, my husband was trying to calm me down, and our other friends — Democrats —were trying to keep everybody from breaking the furniture.

Apropos of nothing this crazy teabagger, and we know he’s racist no matter what color his wife is, just threw out a salvo? Surely a large group of Democrats, wholly owned by the personal nature of their political beliefs, didn’t throw out an off-handed tea party jibe. Surely not. I’ve never heard an average liberal, assuming everyone has their groupthink on, blurt out a disparaging and intolerant remark.

We argued about healthcare and welfare, President Obama’s nationality and religion, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We did not agree on anything. But honestly, the issues were not important. What matters is how personal it quickly became, how vitriolic, how filled with hate. He said I was sucking the country dry with my support of food stamps and public education. He said I needed to get off my butt and take care of myself. I suggested he sign his kids up to die in Iran, the next place he thinks we should attack. He called me a spoiled idiot and worse. I called him selfish, shortsighted and worse. It was awful, and it went on until after 3 a.m.

The next morning, they knocked on our door and we apologized to each other and laughed sheepishly. All in good fun, the wife said. It was the Scotch talking, my husband replied. But my feelings about them are changed. I cannot respect them as I did before. And as they headed back across the street, I saw the look they gave each other: They don’t like us anymore either.

One of these things is not like the other. One side is presented as irrational and obnoxious. The other is righteously indignant and simply against evil.

And, Ms. Wagman, you dislike them for their politics. They dislike you for other reasons.

My mother had Republican friends. She was a lifelong Democrat, worked with the Adlai Stevenson for president campaign and was a precinct chairman for Hubert Humphrey. She was ashamed of Richard Nixon and thought Ronald Reagan was misguided. Still, she didn’t hate Republicans. She disagreed with their politics and they with hers, but she believed people, no matter how they vote, are basically all the same.

I don’t agree. I don’t want to be friends with someone who is a member of the tea party or is a Newt Gingrich Republican. We are not the same. I equate their political views with thoughtlessness, intolerance and narcissism. I think they are not kind or empathetic. And my neighbor made it clear that he does not respect my opinions or me.

What does the interior of your intestines look like?

My views on all these things — gay marriage, abortion, the war in Iraq, healthcare, education, food stamps, even NPR and PBS funding — seem so logical to me. Of course we need to take care of those less fortunate; of course we want everybody to have the joy and legal benefits of a life partner; of course we want every baby to be wanted and every person to be safe, healthy, informed and looking forward to a better future.

These things are no-brainers to me, and it kills me that my neighbor disagrees. I wonder what would happen if he woke up one morning to find that his son had been killed in Iraq or that his 15-year-old daughter was pregnant or that his favorite sister was gay. What if he suddenly lost his job, his wife got cancer, there was no insurance and not much food? I’m not saying I want life to knock him around. But would he still feel that the government shouldn’t be helping anybody out?

Next time I drive to our cabin, I’m going to make sure I take everything I could possibly need. I don’t want to ask my neighbors for help. I hope it’s their weekend to stay home.

Micromanagement is a temptress. Occasionally, she is needed. More often, she is not. Yet, this temptress is the all-consuming patron saint of modern liberalism. The liberal processes any disagreement with method as a disagreement with outcome. If you don’t think unemployment needs to be extended, you want people to die in the streets. What once was marketing has become truth. At least for assholes.

The entire op-ed is just a whiny screed that reveals how intellectually and morally deficient the author is. If every sentence were replaced with, “Nonconforming groups and  resulting conversation makes Diana an insufferable bitch,” the gist of the op-ed would not change one iota.

I, though, am thankful for such bitches. Though the plural of anecdote is not data, I am very close with one conservative who began her journey after realizing just how stifling, intolerant, and intellectually incurious boilerplate libs are. As long as the true believers insist on acting as anti-missionaries to their cause, there is a glimmer of hope, however faint.