What Liberals aren't hearing from Conservatives, and vice versa

Half a lifetime ago, I went to a community organizing planning meeting and someone brought up the issue of providing child care. The event that was being planned was going to be out of town, with an overnight stay and families were invited. Surprisingly, the idea of child care was met with some opposition. People with children were expected to figure out how to attend and function in adult group sessions and, I don’t know, keep their children quiet or something. I was a single young man at the time, so I had no reason to care until someone pointed out that I should and I realized I was being thoughtless. I’ve brought this issue up at almost every group I’ve been part of since, and not much has changed.

To put a fine point on it, this includes my stint as a board member for a group called “Kids Against Hunger”. KAH events require children to be at least 8 years old, but the organization is geared around encouraging kids to participate. It’s in the name. It’s a family fun time, packing meals for other children who need food. It reinforces the education of what chronic hunger is by having them participate with their bodies and relate to people who look just like them. But my other board members balked at the idea of providing child care. Did they not realize that families with 8 year olds in them also often have children less than 8 years old in them? Did they not realize that they were forcing those families to send us only one adult and leave the other at home to take care of the toddlers?

This is what conservatives mean when they tell liberals that we are forgetting about families. Liberal events tend to be marches, letter writing campaigns, protests, speeches and book groups. Conservatives are generally what you think of when you say “hog roast” or “spaghetti dinner”. But there is no silver bullet I’m proposing here. The Lesbian Wiccan Bikers for Peace aren’t going to pull off a Corn Feed and expect soccer moms to show up. Even if they provide child care.

Another story about KAH illustrates how this divide cuts both ways. I was asked to speak at the County Fair to the inter-denominational service on Sunday Morning. A sizable collection was taken and it was put in the charge of the church that organized the service, earmarked for a future KAH event. After that service, someone from that church came up to me and asked if I believed the Bible was the literal word of God. I didn’t give him a straight answer, but he knew my answer was “no”. I told him we are a 501(c)3 non-profit, not a religious organization. That event never happened. My phone calls were not returned.

If I can’t talk about family with people who want to fight conservative politics and I can’t talk about the politics of chronic hunger without passing a religious test, we’re all screwed. People who care only about themselves will use those divisions to keep us from working together and even working at direct odds against each other. They know how to speak to both sides and get what they want from either. They will profit from our pain. They will sail off in their yachts while we argue about what color and shape our bread should be and where our strawberries came from and the size of our guns and how we wear our pants and when we can kneel and when we shouldn’t and how many terrorists there are and how afraid we should be and what you can say on TV and what the President shouldn’t say and who can buy a wedding cake and where the universe came from and what we are all doing here anyway.

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
Frederick Douglass