> On Sep 10, 2020, at 4:50 PM, Philip Brownell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> Dear Peter,
> I appreciate the tone of your message.  And I realize that people “on the other side” see things quite differently. QUITE so.  For instance, today I was listening to a video between Candace Owens and someone high up in the Black Lives Matter organization.  Now, neither of these two people are me (obviously).  Why do I even bring that up?  It’s to hopefully point out that the two perspectives are SO split out from each other that they cannot hear one another.
> 
> I

The problem as I see it is inherent in your phrase “on the other side”  yes.QUITE so

The starting situation would be this. Maybe you have different idea of how to start



We both were born in this  country and are natural citizens
	We were introduced to the same Constitution, Declaration of Independence , and probably each of  us at some time had to memorize the Preamble
	We were taught the same early history of our country: The War of Independence, the establishment of the 13 colonies, and finally The United States. 
	We learned all about Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the rest of the Founding Fathers and maybe even Betsy Ross
	Then the Civil War.  Maybe things began to diverge here.  I remember first being taught that it was a war to end slavery, then it was war over commerce and boundaries, then back to slavery 
	Nevertheless Abraham Lincoln emerged, I imagine for both of us, as Our Greatest President .
	All through this period both of us were taught something called  American Values. I wander if they were the same. I didnt think much about it really until after I got out of the Army still pretty full of the patriotism instilled by WW2. A huge part of that was a feeling of pride about our , the whole USA, unquestionable moral superiority in the world. I was just a child of Iowa Republicans and didnt think at all of what that might mean. Or what it might mean to be a Democrat.  i reallized that the people that I had begun to make community with  —well they were kind of bohemian-ish  free-thinkers, when the next election came along however I voted for Nixon over Kennedy. The irony was that I was the only TRUE Bohemian.  I was exactly half with both maternal grandparents coming from villages in the region known as Bohemia
	I was spending some time now in college class rooms. I learned that what we had founded in 1776 was technicaly a Liberal Democracy. The Constitution quaranteed that, 
especially the First Ten Amendments. But some of those were a bit ambiguous and were of little help in settling disputes.  
	The decades after WW2 produced an international community of Liberal Democracies of which the USA was the much admired, proto-type member.  

	Now it seems that a bifurcation has ocurred and along the way where one side refers to the Other as (intending to be derogatory) “libs" often with some nasty afixation. And one side refers to the Other as fascists with just as nasty agglutinations.

So, Phil, how did this happen?  How is it that some of us are way over threre and ohers are way over THERE?
	
	

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