Words of wisdom

I'm going to include the entirety of this Usenet post(via Google Groups) since you really need to read it all, and I can't pick just a portion to excerpt.

On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 16:52:18 +0000 (UTC), Randolph Fritz <rando...@panix.com> wrote:

>On 2006-06-12, David Friedman <d...@daviddfriedman.nopsam.com> wrote:

>> I have no idea how old you are, but when I was a college student in the
>> early sixties, the then dominant intellectual view was that conservative
>> views were held by people because they were ignorant or stupid, or
>> possibly crazy.

>And those were the sympathetic views. After 'nam, Iraq, Guantanamo,
>the national debt explosion, universal surveillance, I am much less
>sympathetic.

You have a strange definition of "sympathetic."

You know, Viet Nam was the brainchild of those famous
conservatives Lyndon Johnson and Robert MacNamara. You don't
have universal surveillance, not by a long shot, and you,
personally, are probably not even on anybody's radar screen, the
national debt first exploded under that famous conservative
Franklin Roosevelt, and did so again under Lyndon Johnson, before
moving on to Reagan's and Bush II's versions of explosion, and
all except Johnson had inherited a depression or recession. Given
the existence of Al Quaeda, something like Guantanamo was going
to have to exist _somewhere_ and turning over the inmates to the
tender mercies of say, Saudi Arabia, would not be an improvement
from the inmates' point of view.

You may have a point about Iraq, but it was the established
policy of the Clinton administration to bring down Saddam
Hussein. Bush II actually _did_ it. His only real mistake was
assuming he could keep the peace with the same number, or fewer
troops than necessary to defeat Saddam. And even _then_ he was
getting different answers, depending on whom he asked. Can you
blame him, really, when the "expert" opinions varied so widely
for choosing the one that most appealed to him?

The world is a bigger, more diverse, and more complex place than
you or I are capable of imagining. Where I'm starting to see a
difference between us, is that I _know_ I don't understand
things.

Those who disagree with you may or may not be mistaken. They may
or may not be misinformed. They are certainly _differently_
informed, and this comes of living different lives in different
places from you. I expect a Kansas wheat farmer has a lot better
understanding of what goes on in New York than a New Yorker has
of understanding what it's like trying to make a living raising
wheat for which the farmer is paid the same as he was in 1955,
while the price of bread keeps going up every year, and the only
way he can survive at all is to squeeze ever higher production
out of the same fields, while wondering where he's going to get
the money to plant next year's crop and in the meantime dodging
several tornadoes a season. The stupid don't succeed under those
conditions, they fail spectacularly. Only you don't see it
because it didn't get so much as a column half-inch in the New
York Times, only an auction announcement in the Manhattan
Mercury, because farmers going broke isn't news, even in Kansas
-- especially in Kansas.

He knows there's something wrong with his world, and he sees your
contempt for him, and he makes a link between your attitude and
some of his problems, and he votes his conscience, just like you
do yours. Only he has a religion he practices, and a God he
believes in, and because he does, you show even _more_ contempt
for the only stable part of his life, and you try to make him
accept things that he knows, down to the bottom of his soles and
his soul are _wrong_. And you do it while sneering at him. And
he sees you sneer. And he decides if that's liberalism, he wants
nothing to do with it or you, and you can by God grow your own
wheat before he'll ever listen to a thing you have to say, ever
again.

If you want to convince that Kansas wheat farmer of the
righteousness of your position, stop sneering at him and start
talking to him like he's a human being with dignity who disagrees
with you because he has a different point of view, not like he's
a village idiot who disagrees with you because he's ignorant or
just plain stupid. Because he's not ignorant, and he's not
stupid. But he sees a lot of ignorance and stupidity in that
sneer of yours.