I’m learning more and more that Lenore is a powerful force, and her image is a good way to move forward, a day after the real world collided with my blog and shook up the peaceable kingdom a good bit. You can not look at Lenore and  fail to smile if you have a beating heart.

I’ve mentioned political things two or three times on the blog, and I don’t care to do it much. Politics has become a disturbing, unenlightening thing to me, and to many other people, and I have come to see both ends of the shrinking political spectrum – the far left and the far right – as increasingly fascistic (parts of the animal world as well)  in that disagreement is no longer tolerated, different points of view no longer heard or considered, and people with different opinions increasingly demonized. I have the sense of these eternal and rigid arguments going on forever, no one ever again meeting minds or changing any.

For many years of my life, I lived in a world where the demons were Republicans – Nixon, Reagan, Bush, gathering forces of the evil right. People were brave and outspoken at dinner parties and dinner tables, but they never seemed to do much beyond anger and outrage. When I moved upstate, I encountered the same thing from the other side – the evil Clintons, the villainous Obama, the massing forces of the left.

Everywhere, what I saw was anger, self-righteousness and paranoia, but nobody was making much progress talking to actual humans who felt differently or understanding them. So there are Red States and Blue States and a left and right, and the media and political system has embraced this idea that there are only two ways to look at the world and you have to be one another. That is not a hat I want to wear.  I get to label myself and if there is an existing label that fits me, I have not heard it. Women’s health and women’s rights are important to me, for all kinds of reasons, some of them very emotional for me, and this isn’t a place to go into them.

When I wrote about Planned Parenthood yesterday, I knew I would catch all kinds of Hell, and I did. Aside from the obvious, many people see the blog as a sanctuary from the real world, not as part of it. But it didn’t turn out badly. Some people assumed I had to be on the “left” and a goodly number threatened me, promising me that the blog would become extinct and all of my readers and followers were flee. Sadly, I knew if I had taken the other position, I would have gotten much the same response from the other side. Genuine conservatives remember that freedom of speech is a patriotic, almost sacred American tenet, and so do true progressives. We have forgotten how to listen to one another.  I had good conversations with a number of people who disagreed with me, and when the shooting was over, I had only banned one person from my Facebook and only a handful of people said they would leave.

People who disagree with me are welcome here, as are people don’t. I’m not running for mayor, and I don’t ever argue my beliefs. I just have to be  honest about them. Nobody has to leave because they see things differently, but I won’t be told what to say or threatened.  I’m not ready to give that up, even in our political culture and I have the most wicked temper when somebody tells me what to write. I have a Thomas Paine chip embedded somewhere. I don’t know as I’ll ever be that spiritual as to give him up. I believe politics should generally stay away from my life and from the blog, but I do not live in a fairy tale, or a magic kingdom. Sometimes things come along that I need to talk about. And I will.

I very much appreciate the good people who struggle with painful and emotional issues but I really admire those who also remember that they are talking to other human beings, who feel things just as passionately.  Leaders like Gandhi and Mandela always remembered that their opponents were human and thought of them that way. Leaders like Stalin and Mussolini did not. People who disagree with me in a respectful and listening way are not my enemies, they are the friends of a free world. Lenore, do your thing.