So long to Texas

VACATION DIARY, PART 5: Being there

And so it ends. We went shopping yesterday in San Marcos, the county seat, a college town of about 40,000. We went to Best Buy and a few other places and had lunch at Appleby's. It was almost like being in the real world. That was the only thing we had really planned for the whole trip, which is about right for a one-week vacation. I've been on those week's off in which everybody has a list of something to do or somewhere to go, and, I swear, it's a lot more exhausting than a week of work. Today we've got the Alamo, sandwiched in between the trendy stores of the Riverwalk and a jaunt across the border for something really cheap! Maybe it's because I'm older, or because I've just had enough of giving famous places the quick once-over, but I'm at the point where I think vacations should encompass more being than doing. They should be aimed at renewal, at least emotional if not spiritual. Vacations are a time to slow down and take stock, to think about who we are and what we want out of life, to be at ease with ourselves and our loved ones in ways that we let slide by in our working-day routines.

I was able to tap into my reservoir of calmness here in Texas, so it was a good week off. It was, in many ways, the perfect time for me to take a vacation. My colleague Bob Caylor and I had gotten all the interviews of political candidates done and had talked about which ones we wanted to endorse; I had even written my half of them. So I was able to leave with a sense of something accomplished and the feeling that I wasn't burdening Bob with an unbearable week of work. And I was able to get away for awhile from things political just at the time when I was most sick and tired of them. Being sick and tired of politics is not a good state to be in for one whose job involves a good deal of commentary about things political.

What is so wearying this time of year is how we are all herded (or let ourselves be herded) into these two extreme camps. We are either liberal or conservative, left or right, Republican or Democrat, Red State or Blue State. There are two ways to look at the world, and we must choose one and only one. And the most zealous partisans don't want us to see the world in any other way. I heard one of them the other day going on and on in a snide, condescending rant about how useless "moderates" are because, not really believing strongly in anything, they bend with the prevailing political winds. It doesn't matter which particular end of the spectrum this commentator was from; you hear the same sort of thing from the left and right these days. In the study of informal logic, this is called the fault of "bifurcation" (from the Latin prefix "bi," meaning "two," and "furka," meaning "fork" or "branch") -- using an either/or statement (or an implied either/or statement) to argue that there are only two possibilities when in fact there might be many more alternatives. Some things truly are either/or -- you can only be one or the other. You can be alive or dead. Man or woman. Rich or poor. But usually things are not so clear-cut. The statement "We must either pass the new federal budget or watch this nation go down the drain" ignores a whole range of other possibilities. Such as a new version of the budget, or a new budget altogether. Or state action that might substitute for missing federal funds. Or action from the private sector. And on and on.

Most of us live our ordinary lives in the real world where there are myriad choices with intricate histories and complex ramifications, not in the pretend political world where there are only two stark choices. We might call ourselves liberal or conservative or libertarian, but that is only our starting point, the lens through which we view the world based on our experiences and the thought patterns we have built around them. We still take every situation as it comes, using our philosophical inclination to help us sort through the facts we can discern, not as proof of where we should stop considering the facts. My brother is a good example. He is a gun enthusiast and ardent 2nd Amendment supporter who thinks Rush Limbaugh is a nut. He is a border-state resident who gets incensed at the lack of a solution to the problem of illegal immigration, but he also thinks the pharmaceutical companies are greedy opportunists. I could go on, but you get the point. He is a complex human being who does not fit neatly into the left-right paradigm.

So are we all. The only sane, rational way to live is to make the best decision possible based on all the available evidence, wherever that evidence might lead. That rationality is what gets lost in the political season. And the funny thing is, the politicians know that, too. When the political season is over, they have to live in the same real world the rest of us inhabit, and make the best decisions they can, no matter what rhetoric they spouted to get elected. One of the strangest elections I've written about was the last mayoral contest. We had Graham Richard, the Democrat, talking about how efficient he had been in paving the streets and filling the potholes and getting the garbage picked up. And we had Linda Buskirk, the Republican, talking about how that was all fine, but where was the grand vision for Fort Wayne? (The way Linda's ads ended up sounding was, "Hey, vote for me, all Richard did was make your government work the way it was supposed to." Any wonder why she lost?) Of course, once he was re-elected, Richard started trying to fashion a grand vision, and if Buskirk had won, you can bet she would have kept those potholes filled. That's the way it is in the real world.

I call myself, these days, a "moderate conservative with strong libertarian tendencies and a few liberal skeletons in the closet." When I wrote that on my first blog post about a year and a half ago, it elicited a comment from someone who said he was, I think, "a strong conservative with some libertarian inclinations and a few liberal skeletons in the closet." We were both identifying ourselves as somewhere to the right of center. Based on our best self-definitions (always subject to revision), we likely start from nearly the same premises in studying any issue. But we might end up in different places, still willing (I hope) to argue about our differences and their implications. At least that's what I've been thinking about in my too-short week in Texas. Ask me again next year when we have to go through this all over again in a mayoral election between two as-yet unknown candidates who are even now lining up those stark choices for us to consider.