labels

Labels and the words they come from are on my mind a lot lately. Politically speaking (and how you wish I wouldn't) Liberal is the opposite of Conservative...and never the twain shall meet. It's usually framed as people vs money; environment vs money; social values vs money...you get the idea. In many parts of the world, the money "side" is accompanied by inflexible and malicious ideologies, proponents of which hate everyone and everything outside their narrow scope. People even label things as simplistically as "LEFT" and "RIGHT", where for many, "left" = "wrong".

On the other hand, most people are neither wholly liberal nor wholly conservative, in their common senses. For instance, I consider myself to be liberal (opposite = stingy) with friendship, compassion, hospitality, money for both personal pleasure and helping others, and distaste for those who put money over people/environment/social values. But I'm also conservative (opposite = profligate) when it comes to friendship, personal & environmental resources, things I consider to be human rights including freedom of speech, access to clean water/air/food, justice, housing and medical care, and money when it's being stolen to enrich the already over-rich or fund totalitarian regimes. Only we can't call it conservative any more because that's been usurped by the labellers. It's now called "conservationist", which is definitely "wrong" in their eyes.

It's only a matter of time before people start ostracizing the left-handed among us, as they did in the bad old days.