Not Stupid

Once upon a time, somewhere long ago, I heard someone assert “Conservatives care about themselves, Liberals care about others.” The professor in C-42, my freshman logistics course at the University of Florida, would have junked it as a “hasty generalization” invalid for our reasoning process, and I know that is so; but it has stayed in my mind as a warning lest my political views clash with my knowledge and love of God and of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

Contemning, despising no one but the certitudinous and condemning nothing but certainty, certitude, I abide self-consciously certain that nothing is certain but death, especially not my own certainties, least of all my political and religious certainties. Politically saluting the Red, White and Blue, I can sing the songs and hymns that I have loved throughout this lifetime, more into the tunes than the poetry, into the stirred memories than the theology. Politically trying to listen and understand more than to rant. I can stand on Sunday mornings and say the Nicene Creed -- cobbled together by a synod of fractious, cantankerous, naive old prelates each as certain as sin that the bishop standing next to him was dead wrong in his theology -- as long as it begins “we believe” and not “we know,” because we humans know almost nothing; and re: politics and religion we are not eager to hear, learn or understand the views of others, only to impose ours on them.

Now when a nonentity named Gruber speaks of “the stupidity of the American people” it hurts me deeply and personally, as one of the American people, to hear friends, acquaintances, strangers, loved ones, rant political views in which they, perhaps unknowingly, include me in their damning. I am not stupid. A college professor, Gruber is nonetheless an idiot and a gardenia fool. He is stupid. And a liar: he said I don’t care about the uninsured, that I only care about costs. That’s not so. I am appalled and ashamed that in my beloved wealthiest country in the history of Earth, we can do so many things and yet not want to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. Poor people are not stupid either, they are simply poor -- Americans, countrymen -- with no idea how honorably and ably to climb out of poverty. If we can afford to go to the moon and beyond, we can afford to care for others. If we can afford decades-long wars, we can afford to see that the poor have medical care. If we can condemn abortion but not care for the children of poverty that are produced by those who do not or are not allowed to abort, we are at the far dead end of a moral spectrum of evil. Gruber is a moron who was dead wrong in what he said about me, I am not concerned about the costs but about the uninsured. He was right though, if he has blown the whistle on yet another political shamsters’ flim-flam of the American people, who, like me, are not stupid but want to trust. And who, like our religious icon, know we must care for the least of us.

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