Thoughts While Riding

• Well, I got a good 3 hours of LSD in today. Btw, LSD in distance sports means Long Steady Distance not the other thing, in zone 2 mostly with a few zone 4/5 kicks on hills for fun. That felt really good. Cloudy skies medium wind and lower to mid 80s. Nice. Hopefully I’ll be able to repeat that Thursday.
• Well, during the ride I was thinking I’d try to work on thoughts for an essay. But … I’ve got reading to do and time is short, so it’s going to be brief and likely a bit scattered [hah! like that’s different than usual?]

When I wrote an essay on one reason “why I’m conservative” it engendered an oddly heated response. I was considering the opposite, “why I’m not a liberal” and one reason was that I see the elephant in the room they seem to miss. Some examples:

• A year or two ago, Mr Schraub suggested some books for me to read. One of these was called Covering, which was an narrative account by a gay lawyer of the “covering” up of a persons identity to fit in the job he of his choice and how hard that was. Yet, the elephant he missed was the reverse effect Badging. He had to “cover” to hide personality traits and lifestyle “badges” that were not accepted in his chosen workplace. Yet badging is done and in fact sought out by everyone. As I have noted before, cyclists shave their legs as a “badge” demonstrating to those in the know that they belong to that group. Yes, professional cyclists have practical reasons to shave their legs, but the rest of us amateur cyclists do so as well even in the absence of those reasons … to badge. Covering in essence is a violation of badging. It is camouflage, i.e., deception … which is why society reacts poorly to it. But the point here is not about the details of badging vs covering. It is that liberal/progressives focus on the element that they are sensitive to, and ignore the larger elephant, i.e., reason for the practice.
• Take marriage. Progressives are up in arms about the equality and the rights for gays to marry. When last discussing this, I ran some numbers for the village in which I reside, Lemont.  Lemont  has a population of just under 16k. My rough calculation yielded that for towns in general in the states about 15 gay couples would like to marry in this town (total not per year). Furthermore the population in Lemont contains a good proportion of Hispanic and Eastern European immigrants. It is likely that demographic would depress this number by a significant fraction, so my guess would be that the real number would be around 4-6 couples. Yet the elephant is missed. This is one of the big hot topic family issues for progressives. Yet, if you listed and polled and did a real study of problems families and couples face in Lemont. Then order them by the numbers where do you think by the numbers that SSM would appear? I’m guessing it wouldn’t show in the top 100. Yet this is the one that gets airtime. Now I can understand when actual gay bloggers and writers who wish to get married discuss this. I don’t get it when the rest do. There’s something else going on here. Why are they ignoring the elephant?

Now it’s likely that a progressive might be able to make the same accusation turned around at me, a conservative. Claiming on some other issue I’m ignoring the big picture for a seemingly insignificant detail. So, is this a generic feature of our divide? Or is it a right looking left one?

Filed under: Conservative • Liberal • Mark O.

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