I'm a liberal and I'm not sorry.

Don't use that big government argument on me anymore. Government spending grows under conservative administrations, too. Of course, we can argue about what defines or justifies growth, whether to factor out war, or the culpability of the executive versus the legislative branch. (We won't even mention that darn judicial branch, or someone is likely to hurt somebody.) We can go back and forth until the end of time as we know it.

Don't call me an elitist, either. Maybe those guys in D.C. identifying themselves as liberals are elitists; in that town, the designation applies to almost everybody who wasn't born there. I don't believe the way I think is better than anybody else's. I'd rather not have anyone else legislate morality, either.

I don't think regulation is always bad and I'm not sorry. Of course it ends up as a bureaucratic mess that I enjoy mocking. The flip side is profiteering. Neither is great. I've been waiting for someone to come up with a new idea, but I suspect it makes other people's heads hurt, too.

Do I like that FDR stacked the Supreme Court to get his way? No. Do I like that LBJ would do anything playing senatorial Let's Make A Deal? No. Do I think the Great Society welfare system promoted productivity? No. I don't feel compelled to embrace all aspects of liberalism or its representatives. I regret some of its consequences. (Shoot, that's being sorry, isn't it?) As a liberal, I'm allowed to do that, one of the benefits of flirting with moral relativism. (Still, I can't embrace that wholly either.)

I'm an idealistic idiot for hating to see young men die in wars, believing every alternative should be explored before choosing that option; for hoping that every human being can have some semblance of a decent life; for believing civilization sometimes requires denying the natural self-interest of individuals for a common good. (Whoa, that's beyond liberal to socialist, like our foolish European allies.) Of course, who decides the common good? That's always a sticking point, isn't it? The group of people that decide is usually acting in self-interest.

I live in a gray area and I'm not sorry. People all over the world have families and lives and their own reasons for acting as they do. No, I'm not talking about people that blow up buildings. Do they represent the average Middle Eastern guy? Sure, there's good and evil, but most of the pesky stuff falls in between.

It doesn't seem sensible to me to judge communities by extremists, but I'm just a silly liberal. It doesn't make sense to me to interpret life as though it were a collection of bumper sticker slogans, even if some of them are pretty funny. It doesn't make sense to me to demonize people in order to dismiss them.

I don't know everything about world affairs and don't pretend to. I can't offer any solutions, either, just like a liberal. Actually, that doesn't seem much different than conservatives saying to leave everything alone. But they don't. Here comes that headache.

I believe that all people have more in common than differences, simply by virtue of being human, and that divergence in political ideologies isn't as important as we think. Maybe it's even good to disagree just for the sake of balance, rather than deciding who's right.

Go ahead and laugh at my simple-mindedness. I believe laughing is good.


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Read what prompted this story here.