I’d be ashamed to call myself a “liberal.” All over the news, in the papers and on the streets, anti-liberal opinions spew forth in a volcanic fury burning all who oppose, and there is no response from them. Liberals make no comment; they barely write a letter or two, they send less than a few private emails. There is a total lack of objection made to any arguments made by the mutinying right. Liberals have become as spineless as the president they elected.

You’re apathetic, mute and utterly flaccid. Education costs soar as private profits rise; corporations today pay 10 percent of their profits in taxes compared to 40 percent in 1960. Three-fourths of corporate profits come from suppressing wages. Unions across the country are quelled. Eighteen percent of people don’t have the money to feed themselves. Poverty is more than 15 percent and unemployment is at a record high; those are facts. Where is your voice?

In the midst of the worst economic and social conditions, you remain mute. Your president surrendered on health care insurance, the debt ceiling, the Bush tax cuts, the wars and damn near every issue that’s come to his table. You who have created him shall be like him. You do not hear, you do not see, you cannot walk or sense; you are dumb to a world you don’t interact in.

Not that the libertarians are any better; their only response is ad hominem attacks, intolerance and rhetoric. Both types of responses are detrimental to the truth. Our world needs honest debate and diverse opinions. Yet all our right wing can do is destroy the public it. You need to remove yourself from your private concerns to debate for the common interest. Me, myself and I; my corporation, my pocket book, my house: the rest of the world can be damned!

Just listen to yourselves: the HPV vaccine causes retardation, Paul Revere warned the British, God creates hurricanes to punish homosexual toleration, Obama is a Muslim. These are beliefs or flat lies. The right wing inarguably defends these statements; beliefs cannot be proven or disproven, debated or argued. When all your arguments become a matter of belief, the facts of the world cease to matter and you become an idiot.

We’ll always disagree, but we don’t have to impose. Facts come to light through tests and trials. Is abortion constitutional; what should the capital gains tax be; what does the right to bear arms mean? Let’s get together, debate it and see what comes from it. That is the truth we can know. Divine truth cannot be our truth; nor can opinions, tastes or beliefs. So stop imposing them on the public.

There is no evidence, no objection and no room to prove your beliefs. Facts need objections to bring clarity and understanding to them. A world free from intelligent interactions is deprived of reality. Don’t destroy belief by trying to prove it, and don’t destroy debate by forcing belief. We lose the world when we fail to hold and share arguable opinions. Thomas Mann wrote, “Opinions cannot survive if one does not have a chance to fight for them.”

Can we no longer simply discuss an issue as equals with a civil tone? To remain silent may make you happy; ignorance is bliss, but it is also nameless. To bludgeon your opponent with your beliefs is just the same. It’s invigorating and critical to debate your opinion. Yet liberals turn away from it while “conservatives” destroy it.

Intelligent debate requires tolerance for opposing opinions and civility for your opponents. Others may be wrong, but then it’s your duty to show them why. Or, God forbid, they may be right, and you’d do well to listen. Without respect for your opponent and toleration for their ideas, the debate is useless. Without a point that can be debated, you can do nothing more than tyrannize.

Civility, tolerance and interaction are necessary to find the truth. To attack the person or their character rather than their argument destroys the possibility of a debate and it short circuits the truth. If you never hear or consider another perspective, you’re incapable of stepping into the world. You become lost.

The potential to define yourself, learn some truth and interact in the world is all around you. If you never raise your voice, you can never come to your own understanding of the true world. If you never tolerate nor respect another’s opinion, you’re just as closed, if not worse. We live in belief, unable to neither confirm nor deny what we think, and because of it we have lost our identity as well as our reality.