To err is human, to change your mind as a result is also human
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To err is human, to change your mind as a result is also human
Some people only change their position on an issue when they're personally affected. And by "some" I mean "all."
I regret to inform you that the leopards are eating people’s faces again. LOL, what Trump-supporting redneck got screwed by the Republicans this time? Well..
Here’s how it started:
What was that old saying, about how a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged?
Of course, the flip side is that a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested. As you may have noticed, quite a few self-professed conservatives have found themselves in the dock lately. And the same people who’ve spent years burnishing their tough-on-crime credentials have been converted to the cause of criminal justice reform.
Well, just this once. For certain people.
Meanwhile, the Venn Diagram for very online people who wanted to abolish (or “defund”) police and prisons in 2020, and in 2023 are lamenting the dearth of lethal injections for the January 6 putschists, has a lot of overlap.
When the accused and/or the victim has a particular political affiliation or social standing or race or gender, criminal justice reformers turn into Dirty Harry while people with “Trump or Death” stickers on their trucks turn into Sister Helen Prejean.
This applies to almost every political or social issue. And, paradoxically, we seem to get angrier at our ideological foes when they come around to our way of thinking.
Shivani Sathanandan is getting absolutely savaged by right-wingers in her Facebook comments, and other progressives who’ve backed off the half-baked police “defunding” efforts of 2020 get ruthlessly mocked instead of congratulated. Meanwhile, when Republicans come around on, say, same-sex marriage because they find out their own child is gay they’re met with some variation on, “oh, now you’re in favor of it because it affects you. Go fuck yourself.”
Whenever I see that kind of argument, my response is usually a variation of, “um, yeah, that’s literally how pretty much literally every social movement in history has gained acceptance.”
It happened with me. I warmed up to LGBT rights, and later same-sex marriage, as I got to know more friends, co-workers and family members who were openly gay. I’ve always been uneasy with “assisted dying,” but when people I know found themselves suffering with incurable, painful medical conditions, I started rethinking my (still deeply conflicted) position. And after three or four years of bad Simpsons episodes, I finally realized I didn’t owe the show any more time, stopped watching and haven’t looked back, not even watching it when it belatedly but mercifully ended in 2009…wait, what?
The fact us, none of us come out of the womb with our positions fully formed. We change our opinions constantly, depending on our personal experiences. I’m doing my best to roll with it as new facts come in, instead of clinging to incorrect and outdated beliefs when I know they’re on increasingly shaky ground. (I’ve long struggled with rigid thinking, one might say.)
There’s nothing wrong with that - if you’re humble and honest about it. It’s one thing to change your mind on, say, abortion or criminal justice when it suddenly affects you. It’s another thing to rationalize changing your mind just this once while remaining a hardliner for everyone else.
We all do this, even if we only notice it when the other guys do it. The best we can do is accept that it’s definitely going to happen again, no matter how certain and righteous we feel today.