8/14/2006

Patience, Courtesy, Golden Rule Prevail

After viewing An Inconvenient Truth, Marsh Smith offers this wisdom:

[There are many] reminders that more unites us liberal and conservative Americans than separates us. Leave it to the “hot button” pushers to keep us divided, and sometimes preventing us from saving the most precious things.

Did you ever see the Bugs Bunny cartoon about the two hillbillies who wanted to make rabbit stew out of Bugs? Every time the hillbillies would corner Bugs in an inescapable place, Bugs would begin to talk like a square dance caller and dance the hillbillies down holes, off cliffs, in front of trains, down open manholes, etc. While I’m glad that Bugs survived, I’m less than happy when politicians (of both stripes) use hot buttons, like the square dance calls, to divert our attention from saving the precious things in this life.

About ten years ago I was talking to a lady with a garden club about some environmental legislation that Senator Kinnaird had sponsored in the state legislature. The lady was very excited about the legislation until she heard that Sen. Kinnaird had sponsored it. She frowned and said that she could never support anything endorsed by Kinnaird, because Carrboro passed town ordinances favorable to gays when she was mayor. I’d say the garden clubber was “danced down an open manhole.”

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