The Blog Post To Restore Sanity

My friend Arden is much smarter than I am.

At this point I would like to cut to a scene of all the people who know me personally with shocked expressions on their faces, looking at each other and mouthing "Did he really just say that?"

See, I'm very smart. And, usually, I think I'm even smarter than I actually am. So for me to admit someone might be even close to as intelligent as I am is a pretty big thing. For me to outright say they're smarter is rare. And for me to state that they're "much smarter," is like seeing a complete lunar eclipse.

See why I'm bringing this up after the jump.




Here's the rub of that. On the political spectrum, Arden and I are diametrically opposed. He was all about the Ron Paul in 2010, whereas I was Barackin' the Vote. We debated the merits of the bracketed tax system, and he decried it, while I embraced it. And don't get us started on social politics; we'll bring knives to gunfights on it.

Here's the thing, though. We could actually talk about all of this stuff, not only without getting pissed at each other, but even managing to agree on a few topics.

That's the idea that's left out in the cold in our modern political debate. We've become so used to being placed on opposing sides of the playground that we've turned politics into a competition rather than a method with which to govern the people. Political leaders in Washington and political activists on the street are more concerned with the number of seats each side has in Congress than with the day-to-day problems of living, breathing people.

Arden and I didn't agree on abortion, but we did agree that kids needed to be educated on the consequences of unprotected sex. We didn't agree on bracketed taxes, but we did agree that loopholes needed to be closed and the tax codes simplified.

The counterargument is that we would have disagreed on the specifics of these issues, and that's true. However, even within those disagreements there are certain areas where we would agree, and we could use those as a touchpoint from which to view our disagreements.We didn't shout the other one down for being a heartless Libertarian or an elitist Liberal, though both phrases have been used to describe Arden and I respectively. Instead we found a reasonable place to work from, a place in the middle, simple universal truths that almost everyone could agree upon. And we used that middle place to discuss the rest with mutual respect and understanding.

A few months ago, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held the Rally to Restore Sanity. They spoke out about how the heated, hateful dialog in our country was tearing people who really ought to be together apart. Unfortunately, since then, the rhetoric has only increased in spite.

So here's the Blog Post to Restore Sanity.

I doubt it will have any more of an effect, but hell, I have to try.

Arden and I proved: we can disagree respectfully, we can argue peacefully, we can stand apart together.