Understanding Differences

I’ve just spent some time reading someone else’s blog. While it is sometimes hard to get a feel for another person’s philosophies of life, one occasionally gets a hint that leads one to believe that the other person doesn’t share the same philosophy. But, you know, that is absolutely fine. In fact, I’d say it was very good.

With respect to politics, there are those in the RV’ing world that are opposite of me in our philosophies. But, we can still all take the opportunity to learn from each other, so long as we remain civil. Being a conservative, I am proud to say that I have a lot of friends that are opposite, and I welcome that.

Some years ago, I read a book entitled “Bias” by Bernard Goldberg, who was a CBS journalist at the time. In his book, he wrote of how it was that “most” of the people that he worked with all had the same political philosophy, all lived in the same geographical part of the country, and all seemed to share a lot of the same interests. Goldberg wrote that because they all seemed to be the same, they all thought that they were “living in the norm”, which in their case, was pretty liberal in political philosophy.

Thus, those people took the notion that anyone to the political right of them philosophically was the extremist. Mr. Goldberg’s experiences led him to become more conservative than he had been in the past. Should any reader be interested, here is a link to the Wikipedia account of him. While I am not a fan of Wikipedia being an objective source of information, based on the knowledge that almost anyone can post to it, I feel it valuable to present so others can see his history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Goldberg

It has been my experience that in order to get along with those of the “other political persuasion”, one needs to take a more open discussion. Thus, I tend to want to ask questions in order to help others learn a different perspective. I also become exasperated when those others don’t seem to want to really have a good dialogue.

Should it be that any of us are conversing in the future, and I ask a lot of questions, don’t take offense with what may seem to be “answering a question with a question”. I am just trying to reach a common ground upon which we can be civil to each other.