Broadening perspectives

Student absences can wreak havoc with a teacher’s daily lesson plans, so I was at one time pretty impatient about parents who failed to land their kids in school on time and every school day. One family seemed particularly careless about this, and over some months I had come to judge those parents in uncomplimentary terms, particularly since the father was a county law enforcement officer who from my perspective should have been setting a better example.

Then early one morning my wife and I were headed west through Thompson Falls, not yet at the bridge, when I saw in my mirror another vehicle weaving all over the road at high speed. I had to hit the shoulder to get out of his way and I saw other cars doing the same thing. I remember thinking “this guy is going to kill somebody,” and then driving on muttering nasty things about drunks and stoners.

Some miles later I saw flashing red lights and slowed enough to see that same car skewed into a side-approach with a cop car blocking it and a deputy holding the driver up against a tree. This did not look like a friendly encounter, yet here he was, protecting the public in a dangerous situation, working alone, the same officer who from my teacher's perspective was not setting a good example. I’m still embarrassed that I had never considered things from his perspective; my view of his kids’ absences was a petty problem compared to what he faced in his job.

Two things come to mind when I recall this incident.

First is the debt owed every day to law enforcement officers.

Second is the subject of perspective. It’s a cliche, I know, but “depends upon your point of view” remains a valuable truism. Much of what we think we know, is in reality not the whole picture.

So it is with current political and social divisions in America. In some places and on some topics our perspectives have split so far that we are threatened with violence. Even in quiet, backroads Sanders County, Montana, the potential is there; it is destructive, inexcusable, and ultimately based in ignorance.

In my view, it is also un-American.

Destroying personal or public property; forming armed, belligerent factions; threatening public officials; deliberately undermining our confidence in law enforcement agencies and rule of law; carrying extremist political agendas into what should be neutral public positions (including law enforcement) – none are new to American public life, but we know in some vague American way they are wrong. They are – at their extremities – the tools of socialist or other dictatorial movements and we Americans just don’t do that, or so we want to believe.

It all starts because somebody refuses to broaden his/her own perspective, and then refuses to be just a bit tolerant of differing perspectives. It escalates into defensiveness, then aggressiveness, and pretty soon we’re at each other’s throats over something that really wasn’t true in the first place, willing to burn down the house to solve a mouse problem.

Softening the sharpest edges of this split wouldn’t require the political equivalent of turning the nation into a Rainbow Family convention. It wouldn’t prevent anyone from taking a firm stand. We wouldn’t have to tolerate a drunk driver’s perspective.

All it requires is an acceptance of the fact that our own perspective, while we have no intention of giving it up, may not be the only valid perspective -- a bit of American “live and let live,” if you will.

I don’t see it happening any time soon.

Ron Rude, Plains