The Limits of Labels

We Americans love our labels. They’re convenient, they’re catchy, and they limit the amount of actual thinking we have to subject ourselves to.

We slap them on our students to fit them snug into boxes. We slap them on our food to make us feel safer about eating it. A label allows us to think it’s fine to eat something called acesulfame-K since someone was willing to put it on the box.

But nowhere do we love our labels more than on our politics. Democrat, Republican. Liberal, conservative. Green, red, blue. Blue dog. Socialist. Fascist. We toss them around as all-encompassing blankets. It’s a shame too, because the reality that exists underneath those labels is a lot more interesting.

You’d be hard-pressed to glean it from the nightly news, but there are anti-abortion Democrats and pro-gun-control Republicans. But such stances and personalities take more time to explain and are relegated to forums far outside the sidelines of our national debate. Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold is viewed nationally as a far left liberal, yet he’s often found working with conservatives on issues like campaign finance reform and deferred to President George W. Bush when it came to nominees for the federal court bench.

Upon closer examination it appears that our cherished labels are all but useless.

Take one Theodore “Ted” Olson, the man reviled by many on the left for serving as the attorney who convinced the United States Supreme Court to halt the Florida recount in the 2000 election, finally allowing George W. Bush to take office. Olson, who spends time in Northern Door County, served as Bush’s Solicitor General for four years during an extremely partisan era. Today, logically, this legal scion of the right is making the case for gay marriage in California.

Say what?!

Yes, Olson even penned an article in Newsweek, “The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage,” back in January, and appeared on Bill Moyers Journal to discuss the case in February.

Olson is just another example that makes one wonder what our debates would sound like if we could scratch off the labels and keep them in the trash for a week, or even a day? How would our impressions change?

Take away those monikers that color everything to follow, and let people’s words and actions paint the picture of who they are, what and why they believe. We all know how complicated life can be, how rarely the simplicity of black and white, good and bad, or right and wrong actually apply. Why do we expect our politics and politicians to be any less complicated? Why should our biggest, most important issues be easy to solve? And why would those issues have only two neatly delineated sides?

Even local issues are a lot more complicated than we give them credit for. There are several members of the Door County Board of Supervisors who tout the small-government line, yet don’t espouse cuts to local social services because they see the value of such programs that are helping people right down the hall from them.

The recent debate over the purchase of the Al Johnson’s Boutique and Marina property in Sister Bay couldn’t be qualified or decided using broad labels like conservative or liberal, big-government or small-government.

Each of the important issues we face is colored by its own circumstances, and those colors are very rarely black and white.

Yet we insist on slapping false, boring, constricting labels on our society’s greatest debates.