Another word with Miles

 Hello, Miles. Because I know you are a real person, and I believe you to be sincere, I will try my best to engage with you and have the rational conversation that this deserves. I said "try."

We may agree on terms in the abstract, like "common sense policies," the need for a balanced budget, or the idea that waste, fraud and abuse is bad. Sounds good on paper. But somehow, I think our definitions of terms or trusted sources of information might preclude any agreement as to what are facts and what are "lies told by the other side."

I'm not an apologist for Biden or the Democrats, but not because they are too woke, too liberal or left. On the contrary, I feel they've failed to represent their grassroots base and have basically become corporate enablers, profiting off of the middle and working class while paying lip service to liberal ideals.  You and I might not even agree that being "liberal" is a good thing, so there's a potential non-starter right out of the gate.

Because I spent most of my life ignoring what I assumed was going to be a self-sustaining framework (our democracy), I paid little attention to politics or its mechanisms. So I'm not promising to deliver any well thought-out manifesto backed by fact-checked statistics. I'm not sure that fact-checked statistics can even be found these days without a side helping of spin. 

And I am too old and tired to sort through the weeds of every policy, every action, misdeed and allegation with regard to Trump and his many (in my view) greatly objectionable policies. 
Based on your opening salvo, and where you might sense that I'm coming from, there appears to be a big gulf between the two places that our ideologies have settled. I don't claim to be a dispassionate, objective library of statistics, the arbiter of the ultimate truth. I listen to the narrative from news stories as told by "my side," and it appears, from your talking points, that you do likewise, in your own fashion. 

This is going to take time, and a longer conversation than this little Facebook chat. I think, in the long-term, maybe we can both learn to see things a bit differently than we do today. Maybe through a dialogue devoted to arriving at a common ground consensus of reality, in the process, each of us can shed some of our misconceived notions. 

But as much as I want to have the perfect words to convince you, or anyone, of what I truly believe is right, decent and important, I find that I just don't possess them. I have quick quips and knee-jerk responses, an occasional metaphor and a lot of my own baked in biases. My knowledge is surface level, and my ideas and conclusions, ill-formed, and only sometimes given the benefit of a cursory vetting for accuracy. 

See how, thus far, I have not really addressed any of the actual issues?  I'm reluctant to do so because it is a big can with lots of worms, and I'm not sure I'm up to the task of a debate. But if you pick one topic, or I can, maybe we can have a spirited discussion until someone rings a bell or one of us cries "uncle." 

I'd like to believe that it is possible for good people to agree on all matters of importance, and specifically, those that relate to the beneficial governance of our country. But self-interest can easily skew what constitutes a person's idea of good, and as much as I'd like to believe I'm some Mother Theresa, I know I'm not. Self-interest abounds. 

One of the things that troubles me most, however, is the Trump administration's demonizing and scapegoating of immigrants, utilizing aggressive, militarized mass deportations without the due process of law. The whole tone of anger and intimidation, rather than humility, compassion and yes, gratitude, for the people who, for the most part, come here and work jobs that the average American thinks beneath them. The majority of these people are doing nothing nefarious and are guilty only of coming to this country to improve their lives, whereas our forefathers did quite a lot of unconscionable things to the indigenous inhabitants of this land in their quest for "manifest destiny."

Anyway, as I said, it's a long conversation, and I don't know how much time either of us have, with our busy lives and the imminent collapse of late stage capitalism and whatnot. See what I mean about the inflammatory rhetoric?

Anyway, perhaps a bit of a back and forth will be good for us both. Keep us on our game at least. But I have to have a structure, or I will just go on and on, not sticking to or making any points.

Have a good night, Miles! Til next time...