Enemies' Opinions

I am far from perfect -- some might say "deeply flawed".  I like to think that I have some friends;  I know that I have at least a few enemies -- if for no other reason than that I have a tendency to stand up to bullies, and bullies do not appreciate being stood up to.  To the best of my knowledge, none of my enemies really know me very well; I am a fairly private person.

If you were trying to come up with an accurate and thorough description of me, including my core beliefs and philosophies, you could go about it in various ways.  You could talk with me, or you could read things that I had written, including this blog.  To the best of my knowledge, there are few, if any, audio or video recordings of me that you could observe.  It's possible that others may have written things about me.  You could talk with people who knew me, and people who had heard things about me.  You could talk with my family, my friends, and my enemies.

IF your goal was accuracy, I suppose your best hope would be to use ALL of these sources, if you could gain access to them.  If your sources were limited, and you were especially interested in my core beliefs and philosophies, this blog would probably be one of your best sources, along with talking with me, and with the people who know me best -- but this might result in an unfairly positive view of me.  One of the least accurate sources of information would be the people who have never met me, or read anything that I have written, but have heard about me.  But even that would probably be more accurate than if you spoke only with my enemies, who would likely misrepresent most of my beliefs and philosophies.

Yet, in American politics, this is precisely where many people get their information about candidates -- from the candidate's worst enemies, or from people who have heard about a candidate from the candidate's worst enemies.  And this is true not just of candidates, but of entire political parties.  Many Democrats' entire opinion of the Republican Party is based NOT on what any actual Republicans believe, but strictly on what enemies of the Republican Party have said -- and the same is true for how many Republicans get their opinions about the Democratic Party.  Both sides tend to believe NOT what the candidates say, or what the parties say, but what ENEMIES of the candidates and the parties say.

Last night I watched a television show that featured two Democrats sitting across from each other, discussing the beliefs and positions of the Republican Party.  I was not taking notes, but, offhand, they did not make a single true statement about either the official positions of the Republican Party, or the beliefs and positions of a particular Republican candidate -- though, to be fair, since individual candidates and individual Republicans have a wide range of beliefs (as do individual Democrats), I suspect SOME of what they said DID apply to certain Republicans.  I do not know where the two Democrats got their information.  Perhaps they were deliberately misrepresenting Republican beliefs, or perhaps they were repeating things they had learned from enemies of the Republican Party.  Either way, their statements were blatantly false, and could be easily confirmed to be blatantly false.

This is not a new phenomenon.  For hundreds of years, or perhaps much longer, people have been basing their opinions of people, and of large groups of people, on questionable statements made by the peoples' enemies.  In this enlightened, open-minded, tolerant era, though, most would like to believe we have risen above automatically accepting the opinions spread by enemies.  Somehow, in politics, we still embrace the idea that the opinions of someone's enemies are a good source of accurate information about them.

In this "information age", it's easy to find more accurate, honest information about individuals, candidates, and groups of people.  Politicians make speeches and hold town meetings and even write books.  If someone has already held political office, you can examine their record -- see how they voted on various issues, and what they actually DID or tried to do.  And, if you want to know the beliefs of Republicans or Democrats, you can simply TALK to some Republicans and Democrats -- but you should not expect accurate information about REPUBLICAN beliefs from DEMOCRATS, and you should not expect accurate information about DEMOCRATIC beliefs from REPUBLICANS.

As I admitted at the outset, I am far from perfect, but I DO tend to base my opinion of people on the people themselves, rather than on what their enemies say about them, and I try to actually TALK with people from groups I do not know, or with whom I disagree.

Truth is complicated.