a plea to the left
This is a post I just wrote for teh soapbox but I wanted to share it with the public at large with some minor changes to make it more free-standing.
There's a lot of anger out there amongst the progressive and the liberal and even the moderate antiBushites. People are bitching, people are moaning, people are complaining, and crying, and fearing. People don't see how the right could win. People don't see how so many could be so stupid. People don't see how so much anger amongst the left could not translate to huge victories for them on election day. It is simple though...
Look at the right. They have anger by the bucketful. They viciously oppose giving homosexuals the same rights as everyone because they're angry that they're "sinful". They see the Middle East as a vast empire of evil that needs to be bombed into submission without a tear for the hundreds of thousands of innocent people that perish firey deaths eerily similar to those suffered by Americans in September 2001. They see a man who dares be pro-choice as having no soul, as being some sort of advocate for the devil or maybe even the devil himself. They see a man who would dare tax those who have much and give health insurance to the poor as being somehow Stalin-like. It all makes them mad, anger, furious. As furious as all of you are in this thread...but with one difference. They focus their anger into energy.
That is how Bush was re-elected. Karl Rove was able to take all that hate and anger and fear (much of it generated in the campaign itself) and focus it on a single goal of re-electing a president that so many of us think is completely undeserving of re-election.
We as progressives and liberals have never been able to do that.
I was a founding member of my local Green Party back in 2000 because I wanted to focus my energies and ideas into something more useful than the drunken bar arguments and internet bickering that we all know all too well. I went to meetings and we talked the talk about changing the world. It felt great and I think we all felt empowered by the experience, believing in our hearts that we would actually change things. After deciding what we were going to do, we came to the point where we were to start. We chose local issues, among a few of them being the implementation of Instant Run-off Voting. I had ten people in the party excited, thirty people outside of the party involved, we had enough to do some decent lobbying of elected officials and the public -- we had enough people to actually accomplish something. We agreed that the best way to start was a letter writing campaign and so I did so...writing a letter to the editor of the local paper, writing state and local officials from my city commisioner to the governor. I was getting responses, I was being heard, I was getting somewhere and just as I turned around to see how everyone else was doing....I found that I was all alone.
This is a specific example of the problem that is pandemic among us. So many of us are so willing to bitch and moan and piss our pants, but when it comes time to do something it's too much of a inconvenience. While both Democrats and Republicans were riled up in the months before the election, it was only the Republicans that carried their anger through to the polls. They actually showed up...in record numbers. That supposed record number of youths that was going to show up? Yeah, they stayed home in the same embarrisngly huge numbers that they always do...too troubled by the sacrifice of an hour to stand in line to get off their asses.
This is our fate. We have so much energy but it is at this time entirely potential. We waste it sitting in place complaining about our fate and how shameful it is for others to dare point it out to us and shove it in our faces. We bitch and moan about policies which we despise, but we do absolutely nothing about it. Not en masse at least.
Sure, there are pockets of activity out there. There are large groups of people working towards the rights of homosexuals, there are large groups working on the protection of the environment, there are vast numbers out there doing what little they can to oppose an unjust war...but they are relatively small numbers given the enormity of the issues involved. If they joined up for a common cause, maybe being willing to take up arms for each others' fight on a systematic basis there would be enough, but we are just too damn fragmented at this time. We need to focus like a laser, not diffuse like a flood-light. Everybody feels their problem is the biggest problem in the world and, truth be told, it probably is. There are lots of things that are f-ed up in this world and need to change and it's completely unfair to rank them in some order of importance. They are all important, they all need to be fought for, they all need to succeed in the name of justice, right, and freedom. But to fight you need fighters...and fighters need to fight.
WE NEED TO FOCUS like the right has learned to do lest we remain the minority, lest we remain bitching and bickering, lest we never see change, lest we remain permanently stuck in the 1980s. The future can change, but it won't change as long as so many are unwilling to convert their passive anger into kinetic energy for change.
So please, people, stop all of this and do something productive instead. Please.
There's a lot of anger out there amongst the progressive and the liberal and even the moderate antiBushites. People are bitching, people are moaning, people are complaining, and crying, and fearing. People don't see how the right could win. People don't see how so many could be so stupid. People don't see how so much anger amongst the left could not translate to huge victories for them on election day. It is simple though...
Look at the right. They have anger by the bucketful. They viciously oppose giving homosexuals the same rights as everyone because they're angry that they're "sinful". They see the Middle East as a vast empire of evil that needs to be bombed into submission without a tear for the hundreds of thousands of innocent people that perish firey deaths eerily similar to those suffered by Americans in September 2001. They see a man who dares be pro-choice as having no soul, as being some sort of advocate for the devil or maybe even the devil himself. They see a man who would dare tax those who have much and give health insurance to the poor as being somehow Stalin-like. It all makes them mad, anger, furious. As furious as all of you are in this thread...but with one difference. They focus their anger into energy.
That is how Bush was re-elected. Karl Rove was able to take all that hate and anger and fear (much of it generated in the campaign itself) and focus it on a single goal of re-electing a president that so many of us think is completely undeserving of re-election.
We as progressives and liberals have never been able to do that.
I was a founding member of my local Green Party back in 2000 because I wanted to focus my energies and ideas into something more useful than the drunken bar arguments and internet bickering that we all know all too well. I went to meetings and we talked the talk about changing the world. It felt great and I think we all felt empowered by the experience, believing in our hearts that we would actually change things. After deciding what we were going to do, we came to the point where we were to start. We chose local issues, among a few of them being the implementation of Instant Run-off Voting. I had ten people in the party excited, thirty people outside of the party involved, we had enough to do some decent lobbying of elected officials and the public -- we had enough people to actually accomplish something. We agreed that the best way to start was a letter writing campaign and so I did so...writing a letter to the editor of the local paper, writing state and local officials from my city commisioner to the governor. I was getting responses, I was being heard, I was getting somewhere and just as I turned around to see how everyone else was doing....I found that I was all alone.
This is a specific example of the problem that is pandemic among us. So many of us are so willing to bitch and moan and piss our pants, but when it comes time to do something it's too much of a inconvenience. While both Democrats and Republicans were riled up in the months before the election, it was only the Republicans that carried their anger through to the polls. They actually showed up...in record numbers. That supposed record number of youths that was going to show up? Yeah, they stayed home in the same embarrisngly huge numbers that they always do...too troubled by the sacrifice of an hour to stand in line to get off their asses.
This is our fate. We have so much energy but it is at this time entirely potential. We waste it sitting in place complaining about our fate and how shameful it is for others to dare point it out to us and shove it in our faces. We bitch and moan about policies which we despise, but we do absolutely nothing about it. Not en masse at least.
Sure, there are pockets of activity out there. There are large groups of people working towards the rights of homosexuals, there are large groups working on the protection of the environment, there are vast numbers out there doing what little they can to oppose an unjust war...but they are relatively small numbers given the enormity of the issues involved. If they joined up for a common cause, maybe being willing to take up arms for each others' fight on a systematic basis there would be enough, but we are just too damn fragmented at this time. We need to focus like a laser, not diffuse like a flood-light. Everybody feels their problem is the biggest problem in the world and, truth be told, it probably is. There are lots of things that are f-ed up in this world and need to change and it's completely unfair to rank them in some order of importance. They are all important, they all need to be fought for, they all need to succeed in the name of justice, right, and freedom. But to fight you need fighters...and fighters need to fight.
WE NEED TO FOCUS like the right has learned to do lest we remain the minority, lest we remain bitching and bickering, lest we never see change, lest we remain permanently stuck in the 1980s. The future can change, but it won't change as long as so many are unwilling to convert their passive anger into kinetic energy for change.
So please, people, stop all of this and do something productive instead. Please.
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