The Devil

Well, first Obama was a foreigner; then he was a Communist; now he's a Socialist.  I suppose that's progress.  My Democratic friends are in uproar.  They raise their hands in astonishment, and say "how could anyone say such things?"

Then, of course, I remember that they said similar things about Bush.  Some said that Bush was a tyrant in training; others said that he was crazy; others that he was evil.

There comes a time when the name game gets old, when the lack of fairness, of common sense, of reality gets irrational to the point of madness.  I want to bite somebody.  The simple fact on both sides is that the other guy is just a human being with his own set of ideas, his own deeply felt principles, his own sense of right and wrong.  I have to accept that fact, even if they do disagree with me.  This is the heart of democracy, the spirit of tolerance and acceptance that grounds the American experiment.  We have to give the other guy the benefit of our common humanity.  He is not the Devil.  His ideas may be stupid; they may lead us to ruin, but we have to assume that they were formed with good faith.  Otherwise, the American experiment is a failure.

What is this experiment?  It was a revolution in ideas about humanity and its place in the universe.  It has certain characteristics:

•  It acknowledged that individual rights are derived from a Creator.
  
• It was based on enduring principles compatible with "the laws of nature and of nature's God."
  
• It recognized human imperfection and that a tendency to abuse power is ever present in the human heart.
  
• It restrained those in power through a written Constitu­tion which carefully divided, balanced, and separated the powers of government and then intricately knitted them back together again through a system of checks and balances.
  
• It left all powers with the people, except those which, by their consent, the people delegated to government ­and then made provision for their withdrawing that power, if it was abused.

This was a dangerous new idea, one that believes in human nature, while avoiding naivete about that nature.  It has become the template which measures all subsequent social experiments were measured. We should keep this in mind when we face the Other Guy and call him names.