I have been thinking recently about the personification of thought in our culture. Drive down any street in America and you will see bumper stickers galore, all professing some nugget of political wisdom. "Guns don't kill people. People do." "Don't blame me, I voted for the other guy." "They can have my guns when they pry them from my cold dead fingers." Obviously, they are intended to make a statement from the car owner's political world view, but they also say volumes about the car owner as well and they are meant to do so.
From my perspective, reasoned political thought can't be distilled down to a bumper sticker --or these days, a Facebook post-- and the problems of today are much too difficult to just stop at these pithy little one liners. While I won't say everyone who has a bumper sticker on his or her car is an idiot, I can certainly say that the bumper stickers themselves are idiotic. When faced with a complex and intractable problem like gun violence, there should be a vigorous and thoughtful debate about what can be done to solve the problem.
My favorite bit of political shorthand is the word liberal. Conservatives use the word in a condescending tone in the same way they might say "child molester" or "sodomite." Clearly intended to wound the poor victim of such a lowly epithet, it is intended to end arguments with a flourish. The only problem is, modern conservatives not only don't understand the origin of "liberal" they don't even understand the origin of "conservative." I find myself missing William F. Buckley more and more every day. It seems he was the last true conservative who understood that conservatism is a response to the finite nature of resources and that they should be conserved.
Most of all, I'm mindful of G. K. Chesterton who said that "The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."
