June 30, 2017 at 2:29 p.m.
For every season
For every season
We've had our tough times, to be sure, and tough times remain ahead, but, on this Fourth, most of us deep down know things could be worse - oppression could be greater, living standards could be lower - and in much of the world it is.
When we think like that, the fried chicken and corn-on-the cob tastes especially good. Despite everything, our lives are immeasurably better because of the place in which we live.
Not that we're perfect, by any stretch, and that's where the problems start. They start because, these days, at least in the political sphere, an increasing number of activists think everything they believe is absolutely right. As in infallible, settled, obvious, and so obvious in fact that anybody who disagrees with them should be shut up, if not prosecuted.
These activists think in black and white, and few are willing to admit that things could be a little gray.
Climate change? To many, it's either a complete hoax or we're going to crisp to death next week. Immigration? Either the hordes will impoverish us all forever, raping and pillaging along the way, or complete open borders is the utopian sure-fire answer to all the ills of our culture and economy.
Others want to talk about what they call a sensible legal immigration system in between the two extremes, but they tend to be as rigid in their assertion of infallibility.
These days, we seem as a nation - Left and Right, young and old, women and men, globalist and populist - to embrace a position and cling bitterly to it, to use a phrase, even when the evidence increasingly works against it.
These days evidence is just a slogan, and truth is a myth in the mist. So why search for it?
A wise person once said, given two extremes, the truth is likely to be somewhere in the middle. That's not really true, of course; usually it's a matter of degree and one side is simply less wrong than the other, but the point is the same: the extremist might be right, and sometimes is, but the extremist is no more likely to be right than the moderate, and vice versa.
That is to say, all of us could be wrong. We could be wrong about just about everything we believe. Or just some of it, or in degree. But likely all of us are wrong about some things.
When you think about it, that's a sobering thought, that that which we write about, vote about, and argue about at the dinner table, might be loopy. Yikes!
The Founding Fathers knew this. They often questioned their own wisdom, and they knew humans were flawed and imperfect, which is simply another way to say they knew that people are wrong a lot.
They often recognized their own flaws. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but he knew better, calling it an "abominable crime." And it was Jefferson who questioned putting so much power into one branch of government, the judiciary, because, he wrote, judges are no more or less honest and no more or less partisan than anybody else.
Jefferson asked, Why let nine justices on the Supreme Court be the final arbiter on what is constitutional and what is not when they could easily be as wrong as the lowliest bureaucrat and as off-the-wall as any off-the-wall lawmaker?
And that's why they set out to create the great system of checks and balances that they bequeathed to us. In part, that system was designed to prevent the power-hungry from gaining too much control over the functions of government, and in part it was designed to prevent too much government creep into everyday life, but in part it was also designed to make our government idiot-proof.
They protected us from taking actions on a whim, they built in so many checks and balances that people who were wrong but tempted by the passion of the moment, or by their empty heads, could be stalled until reason could balance with emotion, or wiser souls could step forward.
They created this system because they knew that no person was unerring and that no one has exclusive 20-20 vision about what is the right course of action. The very idea of human fallibility was the root basis of our system of checks and balances.
These days that system is taking a beating by a country populated by activists who do not believe it is any way possible they can be wrong. That kind of thinking leads to some very scary scenarios, for if you are absolutely right, and right absolutely, then no one should have the right to disagree or express dissent.
That's the basis of the call by some liberals to prosecute climate skeptics for "fraudulent" science. As for conservatives, some of them are still trying to ban books by Howard Zinn. Go figure.
These days, it might be a good thing to reconsider what an extremist is. For who is more extreme, the fanatic who mobilizes for extreme action on this or that issue - whether it be for the impeachment of a president or a constitutional convention of the states - or the cool, sensible "moderate" who not only advises against "extremes" but believes those positions should be outlawed because they are so right about them being dangerous.
Who is more extreme, the person with the extremist position, or the person who would outlaw that position?
The people who are always right and who never listen are the real extremists among us. The logical extension of this thinking is that those who disagree with you are not just wrong, but evil. For if their policies are wrong, their intentions must be bad.
This kind of toxicity can only be stopped if America opens its minds and its hearts. We can open our minds by listening each to the other, rather than trying to shout down and shut up the other side, even if in the end you don't agree.
That's the reason, in our letters section, we do not limit length or viewpoint, for we do not want to limit the free exchange of ideas.
And we can open our hearts by listening to the voices of the poor and of the working class and of middle America and to see them as the decent humans they are, struggling, as all of us do, to make a better life for themselves and their families.
That family sitting beside you at the fireworks show, they have hopes and dreams, too.
In a way, American politics is a lot like a Fourth of July fireworks show. That's not bad. A few sparks are good for the soul and keep us on our toes. So long as it's fireworks and not firebombs that are being used. That makes all the difference.
And so this Independence Day, just consider the possibility, that, when it comes to politics at least, you just might be wrong.
If we do that, we will make sure that what is right about America stays right and true.
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