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I ponder who these people can be? The 29% who after all we have been through and after all that’s happened, Iraq, Katrina, Scooter, the federal prosecutors, Afghanistan the head of the GAO. After all the lies and the unmitigated deceit and yet 29% of the American electorate still say, George W. Bush is a fine man and he’s doing a good job.
Some just don’t care, they listen to five minute headlines and talking points and take it as gospel. Some are benefiting from the deindustialization of America and think, well if they don’t like working at Wal-Mart they should just go work some where else. These people are not stupid, it’s just the reality of the issues hasn’t touched where they live yet.
Many of us were raised in authoritarian families and taught never to question. That it is wrong and disrespectful to question authority and many still believe that, and are today raising their own children accordingly. But I’m not from that school of thought.
When the Nuns told my mother that writing left handed was sign of the devil my grandmother told them she writes with that hand because God made her that way and you leave her alone about it. Not that Grandmother was a non conformist but she wouldn’t allow her children to be persecuted by some ancient superstition for something her child couldn’t help.
Was my Grandmother a liberal? She must have been because she raised my mother to be one. Being raised in the era of the civil rights movement I was raised that you’re an Irish Catholic and the same people that don’t like black people don’t like you any better and for the same reason, they think they’re better than you. That Kennedy was the first Irish Catholic President and some people disliked him for what he was not for what he did. She had told me of the signs she had seen in her childhood. No dogs or Irish allowed.
By my high school years Vietnam was the most important issue of the day and with the disclosures of the fabrications around the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the release of the pentagon papers it was not hard for me to believe that the government would lie to me. In those days anyone who uttered any opinions contrary to the status quo were branded as communists and subversives.
Martin Luther King was called a communist all the time in the mainstream press but I didn’t care if he was, what difference did that make? He still had a right to eat at a lunch counter or to ride a bus or cast a vote, the same people still wanting to persecute someone for some ancient superstition, to some how believe they are better than someone else by birth.
My father’s side of the family? Troublemakers the whole lot of them. In the 1920’s when the Ku Klux Klan marched through Springfield Ohio they called out to my grandfather and said, “Join us!” Though a protestant himself he took a dim view of what they were saying about his catholic mother and punched him. It was the first time he was arrested but not the last. He was active in the ironworkers union and was beaten and jailed several times because of it. Once he was returned home unconscious with his head split open after fighting for the right to organize and join a labor union.
A woman down the street had stitched his head up and when the police came to the door several hours later he met them baseball bat in hand ready to go again. He not only questioned authority he openly fought with them if he thought they were wrong. So you see with this back ground how could I ever be in that 29%
In the seventies we burned doobies and laughed until we cried watching the movie Reefer Madness and it wasn’t lost on us that this was government sponsored propaganda telling us that smoking Marijuana would make you jump out windows. We understood that clumsy government propaganda wasn’t new. So when they called them agitators and communist sympathizers and they turned the fire hoses on those people in Birmingham they still just looked like kids to me.
When thousands of teenagers and college students protested the Vietnam War the media called them fifth columnist and again communist sympathizers. But one of them was my sister and her boyfriend and though she agitated me quite a bit I wouldn’t go so far as to call her an agitator and I knew she wasn’t a communist.But then in 1970 one of my friend’s brothers was killed in Vietnam and suddenly the war was real to me.
I saw it in three hundred and sixty degree Technicolor, the horror and reality of what was going on and it changed me. The catastrophic loss of a loved one, the bitterness of losing a son for some abstract cause ten thousand miles away for a people who didn’t want you there in the first place. A wound that for that family would never closed and they could never be in the 29% again either.
I don’t claim to be smarter or wiser than anyone I’m just a product of my experiences and my environment. And because of that I take everything the government tells with a grain of salt. Knowing as I do that not only might they lie but that they will lie unless someone questions them thoroughly. Not because they are bad Americans who think the government can’t be trusted. But because they’re good Americans who know the government can’t be trusted!
The 29% want to believe, we all want to believe but the majority of us just can’t. We can’t just suspend reality and pretend everything is all right. Some of course are just die hard Republicans, my party right or wrong. They don’t realize any more than most Democrats realize that neither party is faithful to their ideological base. Republicans don’t care about controlling the size of government anymore than Democrats care about the poor or the working class.
When I was a kid there was a joke about buying a pink elephant gun for one million dollars. With the rebuttal, why would you buy a pink elephant gun? There is no such thing as pink elephants! The answer was, I know see how well it works!
The 29% believe that there are pink elephants because the government told them so. They’re everywhere, all over, behind every rock and tree are pink elephants. In Iraq the CIA estimated 3000 pink elephants we’ve now killed 975,000 Iraqi’s and still Iraq is over run with pink elephants.
Part of the problem for the 29% is the mistaken belief that the real news is readily available everywhere. There is no reason to dig for it just turn on CNN or FOX it’s all the same isn’t it?
A small part of the 29% are the true believers, George Bush’s base the haves and the have mores. To them all is well, money rolling in, tax cuts, life couldn’t be better. They’re proud patriotic Americans but of course they wouldn’t let their children join the military they might put a ribbon on the Hummer but that’s patriotic enough.
They are all of us Americans, they are not dumb or even slow learners they just want to be patriotic. They just want to believe and they are far enough away to be able to believe and their values system from childhood tells them it’s right to believe.
We will get the government we deserve and there will always be a base number who’s opinions will never be changed. During the American Revolution one third remained loyal to the king. Same as it ever was or as grandpa use to say, you only get what you’re willing to fight for and if your not willing to fight for it, you don’t deserve it.
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