Being liberal or conservative and seeing truths from the mindset of one or the other comes to a person as naturally as having an eye for beauty or purpose that could be different from that of another. I don’t think I could fault my neighbors for planting roses in their garden while I prefer to plant gumamela. I could tell myself that my gumamelas are prettier than roses and so are a better use of a yard than how my neighbors are using theirs, but to demonize my neighbors for choosing roses and not gumamelas would be a rather useless effort. I could try convincing them that gumamelas are prettier than roses, but convinced or not, what real gains have I made on my neighbors?

There’s beauty in diversity and in fact among ecosystems they are more robust, more sustainable, and more resilient to perturbations and cataclysmic disruptions if they host more diverse life forms and dynamics of living.

Some could be conservative and some liberal. Tensions erode the beauty and strength of the diversity of our views and values when conservatives and liberals want all to be like them. In the case of ecosystems, they collapse when there is only one kind of life in it.

We could be conservative or liberal on our conservatism and liberalism, but crisis sprouts when we impose our conservatism or liberalism on others, or begin seeing others as less worthy of our esteem (and worse, as some kind of demon) because they prefer roses and not our gumamelas.

Our world is beautiful. God made it so. But only if birds would let flowers be and cattle appreciate why grass has to remain grass.

Written by Dr. Ben S. Malayang III, former Silliman University President