LIFE: Can't We All Just Get Along?

A chance meeting today with an old friend gave me a chance to tangle with the poor put-upon right wing.

I haven't seen Tom O'Malley in ten years. Before that, I'd enjoyed a friendship and a working relationship with the hedge-fund manager. Tom's prior careers included running a restaurant/bar (which never has recovered from his selling of it), a printing business and a calling card business. I provided computer services to all three enterprises and actually frequented the bar ... to play NTN Trivia on Tuesday nights.

There wasn't a doubt that Tom was a conservative, despite being bright and inquisitive about many things, and that I was a small-c liberal. We had a few discussions during the years and we could agree to disagree.

In the last decade, Tom's moved further right and I might have inched a little bit left, creating a larger divide. But the pleasure in having a political discourse with Tom today was that neither of us were all the way out to the fringe. The key is to admit the other side isn't completely wrong. And both Tom and I could meet in the middle occasionally.

How much? Well, disheartingly, not as much as we used to. He thinks Harper's the best Prime Minister this country's had in his lifetime. I think he's Bush Lite. He acknowledges Bush's failures in execution, but not in theory. BUT, we do agree on things like the concern that too many Americans AND Canadians bleat Not Me!, rather than taking personal responsibility. He abhors the decline in education overall and real-life education in particular. I'm on-side with that, having decades ago tried to get the local school board to teach Media Studies to allow for the mining of opinion in the media for something closer to the truth. I failed.

Tom feels strongly about his positions. He maintains the media in general (excepting radio and FoxNews) are very left-leaning liberal idiots. He cites the Harvard study that showed headlines about conservatives ran 3-2 negative, while the liberal headlines were 3-2 positive. He seems to gloss over the fact that lots of right-wingers create headlines by campaigning against behaviours they later get caught doing, while liberals just do what comes naturally. More of a 'Dog Bites Man' approach to creating news. I obviously disagree with Tom, and my time in both print journalism and radio, let me tell you that "The Media" is WAAAAAAY more conservative than the right wing will admit and that the left likes.

Now, this sounds like a full throw-down yell fest, between two diametrically-opposed policy wonks. It wasn't. It was just an entertaining conversation between two old friends. Unlike the oblivion that I hope Bush and his Bush-ites fall into come November, I'm hoping it won't be ten years until I see my old friend again.