What Republicans Can Never Understand

Even recently, I was a Republican.

I carried a system of thought that made perfect sense to me. It seemed totally logical, and based on my experiences it was.

Then about three years ago, I spent some time with a woman who completely changed my perception. Without intending to, without telling me she was trying to change me, without telling me anything was wrong with me, she simply told me some profound truths about the world. It completely opened my eyes.

And she's the strongest Christian I know.

The Republican thought process is basically this: Every human being is 100% in control of and responsible for his or her life.

This has profound impact on many areas. If someone is homeless, it is because he/she doesn't want to work, and he needs to get off his ass and get a job. If someone is an alcoholic, he/she needs to join AA and stop drinking. If a woman is pregnant with a child she doesn't want, she should've thought about that before she had sex. If someone is gay, he/she either chose that life or has not chosen no to have that life. In all areas, a person should have the strength of will to overcome life's adversity, and anyone who doesn't does not deserve our sympathy.

Now, in theory, that's great. In theory, people should be masters of their own domains.

In the Republican mind, everything is in black and white. Every situation to a Republican is a dichotomy, and when you think of life in dichotomies, it all works very easily and you can deal with the world in simple ways. Laws are easy to draft because there are only two sides of a legal coin to think about.

The problem is that life is not simple. When you enact a law, it has repercussions that you may not even consider. That's because not everyone fits into a narrow world view.

Take, for example, a person who lives in a part of the city where 80% of the population is below the poverty level. If that man goes out and tries to get an education and get a high-paying job to get out of poverty, his community shuns him because he's no longer fitting in with the rest of the people he's long called family and friends. Sure, he's perfectly capable of earning the money, but to do so he has to give up everything that's important to him. We should not be surprised then when he finds himself desperate to make ends meet, robbing a convenience store for twenty bucks. It's not the life he chose, but rather the life that his society chose for him. That doesn't excuse the crime, but it does explain to us why it occurs and why mere criminal prosecution is powerless to prevent it.

Now take the same man, and assume he's always been absolutely unwilling to commit a crime, but because of his poverty he lives in a very run-down, disgusting to upper-class tastes, HUD housing project. The city comes along and sees the project as something driving people away from downtown, and in an effort to beautify the city and revitalize downtown, they tear down the project and let a private company build high-income townhouses. The man's entire life is now displaced, because he can't afford to live where he has for his life, and the new projects further north of town don't have the business infrastructure to hire him or provide him with any money. This is a man that society has not only completely abandoned, but completely frustrated, because he is utterly powerless to change his situation.

What you start to see is that people aren't in control of their own lives. Control is something we imagine for ourselves, but in reality all of society controls us - builds us into an image that it desires. Society desires the downfall of pop stars, it desires the rise of new celebrities, it desires those who don't fit neatly within its many images to be hidden so as not to offend the delicate tastes of everyone else.

And it will always do so.

My new philosophy on life has become this: There's too much suffering in life, so wherever it's possible to eliminate suffering, we should do so. It's a view that no man is an island, that we're all interconnected and responsible for each other. And it's a view that means I can never be a Republican again. Sphere: Related Content