Guns, religion, abortion, smoking, etc. Things that cut across political affiliation - the edges.
It just struck me that there is so much that pretty much everyone at DU agrees on - the big things, the political ideology things - the rallying against horrific republican candidates, defending education, intellect, ideas, progress.
In my 8 years at DU - and in my whole life as a liberal - things get muddy around those things that we choose of free will - the freedom to smoke, the freedom to be offended by smoking, the freedom afforded by the second amendment, the freedom to be horrified at the thought of guns, so many other things.....it is a big country, and the left wing is a big tent.
But the real fires starts when those individual choices bump up against someone else's individual choice. It is when we tend to project our own desires into value judgments of what is right and what is wrong. My wife and I are guilty of it and constantly remind ourselves to try to not do it. Where it gets really tricky is when the choices we have directly impact those around us - wafting cigarette smoke toward a non-smoker for example, or more extremely of course, when someone goes off the rails and does what happened in Aurora - the knee jerk reaction to condemn all guns, and the counter reaction to circle the wagons.
This will never change, because though we are all Dems, we are all incredibly different in so many other ways.
Not too deep for a hot Saturday afternoon, maybe trite and obvious (this is what happens when I tend to impulsively post stuff), but as we work through trying to understand what happened in Aurora, the role of the NRA, how those of us here view guns, I am going to try to also keep in mind those things - often really big things - that most of us here do see eye to eye on.
Carry on....gotta go out and pick some stuff in the garden before the thunderstorms hit!
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