BLESSEDLY DIVIDED MINDS

I am sure I will hear (or would if anyone who doesn't agree with these postings were reading them) that I am dealing in stereotypes, oversimplifying, painting all conservatives with the same filthy brush. So let me make it explicit that that is not at all what I am doing.

From the start I have been alert to how varied and even contradictory people are. So I have noted that there are pure conservatives but also many impure ones (traitors to the cause who are awaiting their moment to strike, as I have framed it with tongue in cheek).

Far from wanting to say that everyone on the right is identical to everyone else on the right, I welcome all signs of inconsistency - of real individualism.

Congressman William McCulloch of Ohio was a conservative Republican - yet he played a crucial role in the passage of major civil rights legislation. Politically that was risky for him and gained him nothing. The country owes him something, not because he was a conservative but in spite of that fact.

Congressman John Saylor of Pennsylvania was a conservative Republican - yet he was also an avid outdoorsman who became a highly effective champion of environmental protection. The country owes him something, not because he was a conservative but in spite of that fact.

Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee was a conservative Republican - yet he gave vital assistance to President Carter's bid to do right by another country through turning the Panama Canal over to Panama. His doing so was, at best, no help to his presidential ambitions. The country owes him something, not because he was a conservative but in spite of that fact.

Even that hard-liner's hard-liner Ronald "We start bombing in five minutes" Reagan somehow backed away from his Captain Ahab-like obsession with punishing Communism to reach a healthy level of accord with Mikhail Gorbachev. The country owes him something, not because he was a conservative but in spite of that fact.

Conservatism evinces a society's death wish, I think. What else can you conclude from the competitive piling up of hideous weapons and the refusal to negotiate away their existence, from the ignoring of grave dangers in the natural realm, from the instinctive turning of groups of people against one another?

What I hope is that a conservative reading my words will say inwardly, "I can't identify with everything that he calls conservative, only with some of it." And I hope (s)he will become more mindful of distinctions and possibilities, rather than going along with the others like a lemming.

A lemming who takes a detour and lives is not a true lemming.

So let's hear it for waking up in time. Let's hear it for veering off and going one's own way while one's fellow ideologues go over the cliff. Let's hear it for contributing - in spite of one's deep-rooted tendencies, if necessary - to our society's viability, humanity, and justness. I say God bless America, where we are free not to be agents of planetary death!