David McElroy

Who gets to decide what risks you’re allowed to take on your own property? Is it legitimate for police to make that call? Or is it your life and your right to risk it if you want to protect your home?

In Florida, a 42-year-old man realized that his neighbor’s house was on fire. It had apparently started as a kitchen grease fire, but the fire had spread. Before firefighters arrived, Daniel Jensen grabbed a hose and started spraying water on the fence between his house and the burning house and on a corner of his roof. At one point, he was afraid his house was in danger and he wasn’t sure whether his daughter was out of the house, so he was spraying water around her window.

All of this seems pretty reasonable to me, but I haven’t had police training that tells me I’m always in charge and my orders must be obeyed.

Police pulled him back from the area of the fire. Then when Jensen again saw flames getting closer to his house — and with firefighters still not on the scene — he grabbed the hose again and started spraying.

At the direction of a sergeant on the scene, an officer then used a taser to knock Jensen down into the puddle of water he was standing in.

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On Dec. 20, 1860, people claiming to represent the broader population of South Carolina met in a convention and unanimously declared that they had withdrawn from the union of independent states which had been established less than a hundred years before. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas followed.

Early in 1861, delegates from all of those states held a convention in Montgomery, Ala., to set up a new federation for their independent states. The seven states started peacefully taking control of military facilities in their territories. U.S. President Abraham Lincoln said he wouldn’t use force to bring the states back into the old Union. But when he refused to turn over one of two remaining federal forts in southern territory — Fort Sumter in South Carolina — the Confederates opened fire and took the fort by force. The war had started.

After the fighting began, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas also withdrew from the United States and joined the Confederacy. Over the next four years, more than half a million people died in the fighting and from war-related disease.

That’s what happened the first time some people tried to secede from the United States. What insanity makes anyone think the power-hungry politicians of this country would stand for it any better in 2012 than they did in 1861?

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For me, it’s always been second nature to try to understand other people and what they believe. I was aware very early in life that I was “wired up” differently than other people were. From an early age, I thought a lot about why people were different from me — and I spent a lot of time trying to understand why they were so different. (That’s what quickly led to my life-long interest in psychology.)

Even at this point in my life, nothing fascinates me and much as observing people closely and trying to understand them. Most people are that interesting, but I sometimes find things I wasn’t expecting. Every now and then, I strike gold and find someone with enough depth that I could spend a lifetime of exploring and not run out of new things to find. Some people are obsessed with football. Others are obsessed with stamps or fishing or shoes. I’m obsessed with understanding people and figuring out how they tick.

That’s the context for the article I wrote Tuesday about the two sides of the political mainstream not understanding each other. It’s so deeply ingrained in me to want to understand that I thought others would realize it’s a big deal if the sides don’t understand each other, but I think I was mistaken.

When I posted a link to the article on my Facebook page, a very conservative friend responded by saying, “It’s not so much conservative vs. liberal as educated vs. stupid.”

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