Conservatives and Liberals
Old Joe Grady thinks it odd that the liberals and conservatives have developed such a distaste for each other. In fact, Old Joe thinks if they ever got together and formed a third party, they would beat in a minute the wishy-washy types like Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. And they could do it if they ever realized how much alike they are.
Take Pat Buchanan. Pat wants to build a wall around America, one that will keep the jobs inside and the riffraff out. It's an extension of another conservative idea: lock up the criminals and throw away the key. Only Pat's idea is not just to lock away the bad guys. You also take all the rock solid American citizens, give them guns, and lock them in from the rest of the world. A lot of liberals believe in the same basic idea, Old Joe Grady thinks, but they hate to admit it.
What is public housing but a way of walling in people who can't afford their own place? What are welfare, social security, and public education but more walls? Put the homeless in their corner, the poor in another, create a special place for the sick and the old, and bus off the kids every morning. Then have the government hire somebody to look after all these people so the taxpayer doesn't have to worry about 'em anymore.
Now either we build these walls, say Pat Buchanan and the liberals, or the American way of life will be destroyed. If in the process we wall into prison a few innocent people, well that's the price of security, say the conservatives. If we wall out of our borders some immigrants we really want and some imports we really could use, that's the price of self reliance. The liberals sound much the same. If we wall into welfare people capable of helping themselves along with those who aren't, well, that's the price of a social justice. The idea that it takes an entire community to raise a child or provide for the elderly, well the liberals scrapped that idea when they saved the Indians by walling them into reservations
So if they agree--these conservatives and liberals--why are they always shouting each other down? As far as Old Joe can tell, it's just about which walls ought to go where. That's about it. If Pat Buchanan and Ted Kennedy could just dovetail their architecture, we could get on with building the great society. Except for one thing.
There are a lot of people out there who don't like walls. They're getting around the liberal walls and they're hopping over the conservative walls. And I don't just mean Mexicans crossing the Rio Grande. They're the delinquents who skip school, smoke pot, slit tires and commit countless other antisocial acts before they ever get caught. They're everybody who beats the system, including the derelicts, often too old or crippled to walk without a cane, who urinate in the streets and then creep away before the social workers arrive.
Unfortunately, Old Joe realizes, they also include his best friends. They are the relatives who didn't frame his education into a school building alone, but took it upon themselves to teach him about respect and getting along, when to take a stand and when to let go. They are the neighbors who didn't shut him out when he became a Hindu for awhile and let half the county's beef cattle loose. They are the companions who didn't think he was gay just because he never got married, and wouldn't have cared if he had been, the same people who didn't put him in a nursing home when he got old and contentious. All these people refused to wall him in despite lots of reasons for doing so, good reasons which sound a lot like the ones Pat Buchanan and the liberals are giving today.
Maybe there's a place, Old Joe thinks, for the ideologically impure, the wheelers and dealers, the compromisers, bridge makers instead of wall builders. Maybe it isn't so bad, a choice between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.