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Edited on Fri Oct-15-04 01:19 PM by hyphenate
I was just mentioning today on another board about how I've been feeling lately, and how the next three weeks are going to take a major toll on me emotionally and intellectually, regardless of who's ahead in this or that poll, and how we've waited almost four years to right the terrible wrong that was perpetrated in the 2000 election.
My attention span has sunk to zero, and my mind is constantly playing out scenarios, and the most horrific ones seem to dominate the thoughts running through my mind. We have spent the past four years watching, waiting, thinking, emoting and discussing the "enemy" and find nothing so clear as to know that "they" are capable of almost anything to make their side win.
It appears now that there are two sets of the "enemy" and that regardless of anything else, we must differentiate between them. If we underestimate either of them, we will end up on the losing side.
The most common set on the right are the ordinary folks in this country. These are friends, neighbors, good people for the most part, who look to the republican side from its most idealistic point of view. These are the people who think fiscal conservativeness is the best idea, that government should be de-centralized, and who fondly remember the republican party as it existed before Richard Nixon. They are not mean spirited, they are not the "dangerous" enemy we have learned to despise, but they are not easily shaken from their core beliefs.
The other set on the right are those who truly dominate the extremist group known as the conservatives in America--there are far less of them than the more common set, but as they are louder, more shrill and far more determined to twist the GOP into their mangled version of the party, they are, by far, the most dangerous people of all. These are the most hateful ones. They are those who have secretly and not-so-secretly created the enduring right wing extreme, who are bound and determined to get their own agenda passed, regardless of how it affects most people in this country. They include the religious right, with leaders such as Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jimmy Swaggert; they are the neocons, such as Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger and Jeb Bush; they are the leftover criminals from the Watergate scandal, such as James Baker, Charles Colson, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and so many others prominent in conservative politics even today; they are the Southern Republicans, still proud of the bygone days of lynching, intolerance and dirty tricks, such as Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, Tom Delay, and Phil Gramm; they are the newest members of the republican party, the former yuppies, whose motto has always been "screw the little people" and who have no empathy for those who are in great need, and they are the sons and daughters of some of the oldtime politicians who have no desire to give the same amount of care and feeding to anyone beneath their station, of which many of them feel entitled, as though they were somehow filled with blue blood.
If we try lumping together these two sets, we lose. We lose because one of them is more like the rest of us than we thought possible, and we lose because the other contains so much evil that it is hard to realize that they are, in fact, carriers of a great deal of influence and power.
We, those of us who come here and to other sanctuaries of democracy, must try to reconcile our emotional burden and try to understand the former set, to try and find ways to compromise with them, and to show them that their party is overrun with criminals and ne'er-do-wells, with selfish, greedy, power hungry leaders who want nothing more than to stifle the freedoms of those who oppose them.
The Democratic Party is filled with people who care far more for others than the GOP will ever understand. It's like the hero in old westerns who wears the white hat, it's like James Bond, who refuses to kill simply to kill, while his enemy never understands, it's like the reluctant protagonist who suddenly finds himself questioning the lies he's been following all his life. We have a conscience and we have empathy, and we need to follow what we feel is the right course.
The trouble is, the more common set of republicans have the same qualities, although they arrive at them from a different viewpoint. It's the hardest thing we will ever need to comprehend--republicans in general are not evil. They think differently, they arrive at conclusions from a different standpoint, and they have a different way of looking at things.
But if we are going to win this election--to make our country once again a strong and noble country, we need to woo these people into seeing that the evildoers that are in their party are the true enemy, not those of us who cherish our rights, our freedoms and our opportunities here in this country.
We must stop challenging ALL republicans simply because of the generalization that ALL republicans are supposedly bad. We must try to firm our relations with these people who are not inherently bad, but simply follow a different philosophy, and who have been sucked into the common hatred we have for the powerful antagonists within the republican party.
The next three weeks are going to be very tough on all of us. We have spent these past few years totally immersed in a common hatred and have formed a "society" here and in other realms of cyberspace and real life to end what we feel is a fascist regime, populated only by criminals of one sort or another, who have hijacked this country for their own betterment, to the exclusion of everyone else. But once the election is over, whether John Kerry or GWB win, we must try to reconcile ourselves to these other people, even if we are still angry at them for their choices. Only by courting the real, true party members, and showing them the error of their choice through examples, proof and historical context, can we hope to unify the citizens against the common enemy.
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