Today’s dual cover photos depict beers in the act of being consumed, three years apart, illustrating my fundamental position affirming the value of conversation, even when the participants disagree.
As an aside, did you know the Non-Aligned Movement remains in existence? I didn’t.
The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) is a forum of 120 countries that are not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. After the United Nations, it is the largest grouping of states worldwide.
The movement originated in the aftermath of the Korean War, as an effort by some countries to counterbalance the rapid bi-polarization of the world during the Cold War, whereby two major powers formed blocs and embarked on a policy to pull the rest of the world into their orbits.
If I consider myself a misplaced European (I do), find my social-democratic-like political orientation to be completely marginalized in the American context (it is), and make peace with the fact that being an expatriate is unlikely at this juncture (alas), then the notion of being non-aligned has considerable appeal.
As such, I’m free to remain a leftist as it pertains to larger issues, and to vote accordingly, while also judging local grassroots political affairs by criteria unique to the immediate acreage lying just outside my front door.
Stated another way, it’s possible for me to have a beer with David Duggins, a Democrat and New Albany’s public housing director, and talk about pressing issues of church-state separation and Supreme Court overreach.
I did so last Saturday.
It’s also possible for me to have a beer with Indiana’s U.S. Senator Todd Young, a Republican, and talk about federal regulatory issues affecting small businesses, American foreign policy, and other topics that have always been of interest to me.
I did this in October, 2019.
What I’m about to say will strike some as unspeakably radical, but here goes: Having a conversation with other people over beers is not the problem, unless you’re concerned it might lead to dialogue in a way that shunning or censoring them almost certainly will not.
What’s more, having a conversation with other people over beers is not synonymous with hopping into bed with them ideologically. Rather, it is exactly as it appears, which is having a conversation over beers.
Now more than ever, I find great comfort in the immortal words of Groucho Marx: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.”
I’m regularly presented...Read more
