Tuesday, November 30, 2004

The party of tolerance and compassion strikes again

When someone follows you for miles as you drive down the road some lonely night, it might be because you have a conservative bumper sticker on your car.

“Did you guys hear?” one of them laughed. “John tailed some idiot with a Bush-Cheney sticker on his car all the way here.” The story got a hearty laugh from my whole group of acquaintances, all liberal. It was a good joke, played on some abstract conservative, retold in the utter certainty that there were no such abstract creatures in the room. I glared straight at John and said something along the lines of “Yeah, that was me, and that was real liberal and accepting of you,” adding a few sailor-approved flourishes worthy of a man who would threaten a young woman with physical harm because of her political beliefs. >snip< Four years later, these are the same people to whom eye-rolling warrants a lawsuit and distributing insensitive Band-Aids is beyond the pale. They belong to a party that prides itself on fighting against political intimidation and laments the sharp political division in this country—both commendable positions. But they didn’t fight against intimidation that night and they didn’t lament the division it might cause between themselves and the only conservative in the room. Why not? I’m pretty sure it’s because they think I deserved it. It wasn’t the first time I got that feeling from liberal acquaintances.

A proposed definition: Tolerance is the belief that conservatives are people.

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