We’ve all heard about the nine Republican state Senators who decided they were going to start voting their conscience, only to be censured by their own party. As if they would somehow become contagious.

This series of events reminded me of something I’ve been wondering about, which is: Why it has become so fashionable to present ‘liberals’ as if we are dangerous, scary people. It is now one of those labels that Republicans throw around in order to discredit a person’s character. It showed up on every other flyer that I received during the last election cycle. And of course it’s one of those terms, for example “communist,” that most people probably wouldn’t be able to define if you asked them, even liberals themselves.

So I thought about the qualities that most of my friends have in common. And the top thing on that list would probably be curiosity. I hang out with people who always want to learn more, whether it’s about you, or about the history of the region where they live, or about whatever hobby they’re interested in. And of course that also means that they are readers. Because what is the best way to learn?

Another thing that most of my friends have in common is that they love people. They love meeting new people, they like to be in small groups where they can have discussions. They like to connect. And they like to help. I feel fortunate to know so many people who believe that helping others helps them become better people. And it also helps make the world a better place.

So far, I’m not seeing a lot to be scared of. But let’s keep looking.

Most of my friends love the arts. They love how music and films and dance and visual arts force them to look at things a little differently. They love how songs and movies make them feel something, whether it’s warm or frightening or confusing or ecstatic, the arts bring strong emotional responses into our lives in a way that is always unpredictable and surprising.

Most of my friends also love to be outside. They love what the earth has to offer. They like the challenge of a long bike ride, or a hike into the mountains. They like to hunt and fish, or float one of the incredible rivers that flow through our beautiful state. They value having access to the best that Montana has to offer.

A few days ago, Bruce Springsteen, who is only three years younger than Trump but looks at least 10 years younger, opened his latest tour in Manchester, England by sitting down at the front of the stage and delivering a calm, measured criticism of the current president. He didn’t make anything up or call him a bunch of juvenile names. He didn’t threaten him. He just laid out his opinion of the man’s actions in a way that was thoughtful and most importantly, factual. Here’s how he opened his speech, and it’s pretty brilliant:

“In America, my home, they’re persecuting people for their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. That’s happening now. In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. That’s happening now. In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers. They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just society. They’re abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those who are struggling for their freedom. That’s happening now. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands. And they are removing residents off American streets without due process of law and deploying them to foreign detention centers and prisons. That’s happening now.”

So maybe that’s it. It’s the honesty.

Most of my friends have never been convicted of a felony. Most of them have never been accused of rape, especially by multiple sources. Most of my friends wouldn’t think of referring to another country as a “sh–hole country.” They wouldn’t think to lump an entire race of people into one group and make sweeping generalizations about those people. Most of my wealthy friends wouldn’t think of rubbing their wealth in your face, or bragging about the fact that they don’t pay taxes, because they do. Most of them wouldn’t brag about going into the dressing room of a bunch of teenage girls while they’re getting ready for a pageant.

Most of my friends wouldn’t encourage people to beat the crap out of other people. Most of them wouldn’t make up lies on the spot just to make others look bad because they got their feelings hurt.

So the only thing that I can think of that makes liberals scary is that they try like hell to be honest, and if there’s one thing that scares Republicans at this moment in time, it’s the truth. Springsteen is fortunate to be huge enough that he can lose a huge chunk of his fan base without worrying about his career going off the rails.

But of course that doesn’t stop Donald Trump from trying his damnedest to discredit the man. And among other things, that means hitting him over the head with the dreaded “liberal” label. It didn’t stop Springsteen from doing the same thing at his next few stops, to the dismay of many of his long-term fans, and as someone so accurately pointed out, have they not been paying attention to what this man has stood for from the beginning?

The saddest part about Trump’s tantrums is how utterly childish they are. He always resorts to the most basic insults, saying he never liked Springsteen and that he has no talent—a meaningless insult coming from a guy who pals around with Kid Rock and Ted Nugent. Trump has and always will resort to the lowest form of attack, and that is exactly why he is so threatened by someone like Bruce, who did just the opposite.

So I guess I’ll keep doing what most of my friends have been doing, trying to become better people, failing here and there, but always striving to improve. Telling the truth as well as we know how, without resorting to hissy fits when someone offers constructive criticism. And hopefully it will continue to scare the hell out of these people.

Daily Montanan is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Daily Montanan maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Darrell Ehrlick for questions: info@dailymontanan.com.

A good friend of mine who used to be the Tribal Chairman for the Northern Cheyenne tribe posted something on Facebook the other day, comparing what’s happening in Israel to the experience of his own people. I was glad he said something about this because it hadn’t occurred to me until then, and it got me thinking.

And of course this is dangerous territory, talking about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, especially for someone like me who knows very little about the area.

But, if anything positive has come out of this conflict, it might be that people are actually doing research to try and understand the complexity of the situation. I’ve watched more videos about this issue in the past week than I have for the previous 65 years. So, of course, I’m an expert now. I highly recommend the podcast “The Rest is Politics,” with Rory Stewart, who summarizes the previous 3,000 years in about 10 minutes, in a way that seems to be very objective toward both sides.

So here’s what I’ve concluded. As so many people have pointed out, both the Israelis and the Palestinians have a lot to be angry about. I didn’t know that the Israelis were forced out of that region 3,000 years ago by the Romans. So not only were they displaced, but they ended up in countries where they were subjected to horrific abuse.

In the early 20th Century, there was a Zionist movement to return to their original homeland. But during those intervening 2000 years, what we now know as Israel had become a region very much dominated by Muslim communities, with only about 3% of the population being Jewish. In fact, it had become known as Palestine. But at the end of World War I, when Europe was divided up amongst the allies, a secret treaty signed between France and Britain, called the Sykes-Picot agreement, gave Britain power over Palestine. Jews had slowly been buying land in the region, and the British supported turning it into a Jewish state, even though the population by that time was still 90% Arab. The British government issued a very controversial document called The Balfour Declaration, publicly stating Britain’s support of Palestine becoming a Jewish state, which naturally led to instant conflict between two groups of people who now saw this as their homeland.

This has been the basic underlying source of conflict ever since, and it’s not hard to imagine how each of these groups see themselves as the victims, or perhaps more importantly, as the rightful “owners” of this region. World War II brought this issue to a head when it became abundantly clear to the rest of the world that Jews needed a homeland. So a military assault took place in 1948, where the Israelites declared the region a Jewish state, and the United Nations agreed, as did several major countries. During the course of the next few years, 750,000 Palestinians were displaced.

Since World War II, there have been several military efforts to force Israel to negotiate some kind of agreement that gives the Palestinians their own homeland, including the The Six Day War in 1967, a revolt that was squashed by the Israeli army. This led Israel to retaliate by taking more territory, including Gaza and the West Bank, which were outside of the 1948 borders, and which is why these regions are now referred to as “the occupied territories.” There was another attempt made in 1973 called the Yom Kippur War, which the Israeli army squashed quickly, in less than three weeks.

Many experts are claiming that these new attacks are an effort by Palestine, once again, to force Israel to take notice of their need for their own country. Either way, the events have been horrific, especially the violence of the initial attack on a music festival, where Hamas showed a brutality that was unconscionable.

So how does this all relate to our own history? The obvious answer is the matter of the displaced population. My Northern Cheyenne friend talked about generational trauma, where the trauma his grandparents suffered at the hands of the U.S. government gets handed down from one generation to the next. The prevailing message our Native communities receive that they simply need to “move on” ignores the fact that there has never been any effort on the part of the U.S. government to issue a formal apology to these people for what they suffered. The chance of reparations is obviously not very realistic at this point, especially in today’s political climate, but ever since I moved back to Montana, where I was born and raised, I have puzzled over why there hasn’t been an effort to organize a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to address the issue of accountability on both sides.

The underlying tension is such that I just don’t see how an organized conversation couldn’t at least break down some of the barriers in communication.

I have always found it kind of remarkable that the anger that exists in the Native community doesn’t manifest itself out into the rest of our region more. It seems the Native population tends to turn their anger more inward, toward themselves, as evidenced by the problems with addiction on our reservations.

In Israel, there have been several efforts through the decades to come to an agreement that is workable for both sides, but these have always been sabotaged, sometimes by the Palestinians, as Arafat did with the Oslo accords. Sometimes it was the Israelis, as with the London agreement in 1987, when Shimon Peres, who was the Israeli Foreign Minister at the time, secretly met with King Hussein over a period of months to hammer out an agreement. But the prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, apparently didn’t like the fact that Peres had negotiated this agreement behind his back, and he refused to sign the agreement.

In the end, as with the still unresolved situation with our Native Nations, it seems that pride and ego always seem to get in the way of the needs of the people. And it is the people who pay the ultimate price.

Daily Montanan is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Daily Montanan maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Darrell Ehrlick for questions: info@dailymontanan.com. Follow Daily Montanan on Facebook and Twitter.