Posted on 11/04/2004 9:46:58 AM PST by youngrepublican1986
I woke up today feeling much better than yesterday, much more at peace with all this. Have I acceded to the calls for "national unity"? Have I tasted of the Kool-Aid and found it sweet?
Hardly.
I simply came to a startling conclusion somewhere last night as I drifted off to sleep. We were told this was an referendum on the President. Wrong. This was a referendum on the American people, and they made their choice. You've all seen, by now, the polling results that show "moral values" as the overwhelming sentiment in the choice for Bush.
So what does that tell me? It tells me that, when you come right down to it, this country is simply not in my corner. And the past generation bears that out.
Let's be brutally honest here: we (liberals, Democrats, whatever) haven't won an election by majority since 1976 and Jimmy Carter. Clinton never had a majority, only a plurality. Frankly, I don't think Carter would have won if he hadn't been running against the spectre of Nixon. So this means that in the past 36 years, we have legitimately carried the majority sentiment one time out of ten. One time out of ten.
That should come as a hard slap. Thiry-six years. One election out of ten.
It's time to wake up and smell the political coffee: WE ARE OUT OF THE MAINSTREAM. The 'Pubs have been telling us this for years and we constantly scoffed and said they were wrong. But it turns out they were right: they weren't trying to job us with political rhetoric, they were trying to help us understand what was happening.
Now, you may steel yourself by saying "Well, we got 50+ million people to vote on our side". But step back from that for a moment. That 50+ million was marshalled in an unprecedented "Get Out The Vote" effort. Millions of doors were knocked on, millions of calls made, millions of dollars spent. A massive effort, a political D-Day as it were - an all or nothing gambit designed to capture the beach and sweep into Washington, putting Conservatives on the run.
And we still got beat, and beat bad. We didn't just see a referendum at the Presidential level this week. We saw it right down to the roots, with the sweeping losses in both parts of Congress, as well as the unanimous adoption of "Defense of Marriage" acts. Put simply, we're not the majority here, not now, not for the past generation or more. Our views are not those of the country - regardless of the yardstick you use. Even those seats we did gain tended toward the moderate end of the Democratic spectrum. And we lost to clear loons like Coburn and Bunning.
How does all this put me a peace? Well, I keep coming back to that "36 years" figure. That's the entire span of my life, plus a few years. This means that for the duration of my existence on this sphere, I have been on the outside looking in, with the tide steadily rising against me.
The mainstream of this country does not support equality for all, secularism, public assistance, environmentalism, etc. Nor do they abhor the things I do. I do not represent this country. It isn't mine, and never was. Perhaps that's a defeatist attitude, but I find it hard to fight for something that firstly isn’t mine to start with and secondly that has no intersection with my personal values.
And that's when peace and acceptance washed over me. There is nothing here for me to fight for because the country I thought I lived in has utterly and completely, at virtually every conceivable turn, rejected my beliefs wholesale.
I would imagine it's the same sense of acceptance a "guest worker" feels. I'm in this country mainly for a job. If I had the wherewithal to go someplace else, I probably would.
I am stranger in this land, and frankly I don't, any longer, hold its tenets close to my heart. I mean here not the tenets of the foundations of this country - The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Bill of Rights - but the tenets of the electorate. Because in the end, the electorate makes, remakes, is remaking, the country in its own image. All countries are portraits of their people. The portrait of America for the past three decades or more has basically looked the same. And I have never been in that portrait.
I am free and at peace now with America, because I am absolved of responsibility for it. As it has shut my voice out, I now can shut it out. Its failures and missteps, its foibles and stupidity, none are now my own.
Now peace, as I cut America out of my heart, as America had already cut me out of its.
Finally they recognize that they are out of the mainstream! What a thought!
Bingo!
Please post an address for donations.
This guy is better but still delusional. Claims his voice has been shut out but we heard it loud and clear and rejected it.
That's not being shut out, that's full participation.
The big problem these people have is in desiring to define words to fit their emotions instead of using words to describe reality as best as words can.
Would that FReeper be considered bipolar?? </grin>
The only thing left to do for this young flibbertigibbet is to emigrate to Canuckistan or Eurabia.
Sad that one could have no hope
"P.P.S.: thank the Massachussetts Supreme Court and Gavin Newsom for making gay marriage an issue. It's like Gavin Newsom is a secret Republican sleeper cell operative."
Yep. When you're doing something illegal and unacceptable to the majority of people, it's NOT a good idea to call so much attention to yourself!
good post...
and another:
I applaud this post! My feelings exactly, the only solace is, you are not alone in that feeling, I feel and see it the same. I have also cut out of my heart compassion for people who don't have compassion for the minority. I say, screw them too. Swimming against the tide leads to nothing but exhaustion and eventually, the tide always wins. There's nothing to live for and nothing to die for.
and another:
This post captured my feelings frighteningly well. Better than I could have voiced them myself I think.
and another:
Why would you fight against the majority? I'm not in the habit of trying to change other people's ideological beliefs. Therefore, I don't belong here anymore.
and another:
How often have we derided Christians for trying to force their beliefs down our throats?
Why would we do the same? Now we are the ones knocking on their doors, prosthelitizing.
And here is another post by the writer of the essay:
When do we stop and examine our place in the country, instead of constantly finding some "other" reason to blame? It's the machines, it's the media, it's the lies, blah blah blah. We're always finding a reason to excuse ourselves and our beliefs from the debate, as if it's been ordained from on high that America wants us here.
I'm just sick of it. It's us. We're responsible for the losses. It's not a coincidence that this wave started in '68, right around the time the repressive mores of America were being exploded by the hippies.
America-at-large saw it and rejected it. In '68, in '72, in '74, in '80, in '84, in '88, in '00, in '02, in '04. Tuesday was not a "sudden" turn, it was just one more year in the list, another ass-kicking that should be sending us a message.
If we want to have any chance of surviving the next decade, we've got to study long and hard what we - not the machines, not the media, not the "opposition" - have gotten so wrong about our fellow citizens over the past 30 years. And what I fear is that such an examination will reveal that America as a collective is somewhere between moderate and rightist. Even the so-called "Big Dog" had to act the centrist more than real "liberal". Thus leaving little space for our values and beliefs.
I haven't changed any of my beliefs since Tuesday. I still beleive in the rights of gays, society's responsibility to the poor, environmental conservation, resistance to militarism, etc. I simply don't think politics, or America, offers any viable arena for my views to emerge.
Actually "equality for all" here isn't an honest phrase. Conservatives support equality before the law, equality of opportunity, and endless other equalities. We just don't support equality of outcome regardless of merit.
One large reason for their bitterness lies in their inate knowledge that they're holding to a political philosophy void of absolutes, and they're incapable of swaying those of us who believe in standards existing outside ourselves to their point of view. This is why they hate us, believe us to be closed-minded idiots, and scorn and ridicule us. It is they who have closed their minds.
These people actually believe we want to install a theocracy in America. They believe we want to unfairly benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. While claiming to champion human rights, they decry the liberation of tens of millions of women and girls. They effectively side with Saddam and the Baathists over the American Military. They want to swell the bureaucracy and expand the tax burden on the productive in the face of overwhelming evidence of detrimental effects on the economy.
When their tired liberal notions are renounced time and again by the electorate they chalk it up to the electorate's stupidity.
At least the writer of the above piece is being honest about his irrelevance. The majority of liberals live in fear of being exposed as the bankrupted inheritors of a twisted political philosophy that doesn't work. They can't admit even a chance that they're wrong, because to do so would destroy their veneer of intellectual superiority. They can't look in the mirror objectively. If they did, they'd simply disappear.
Here or there? I read that over there (storming the voting booths like Normandy). That's funny. I thought that was over the top, or strange that a DUmmy would use an American military analogy, as opposed to one from, say, Che Guerva (sp)
I think this person has misunderstood, fundamentally, what our founding documents were all about.
Not really. The only thing he's gotten is that America doesn't bite off on his brand of liberalism. He still calls Coburn and Bunning loons which means he still thinks he is right.
Check this out.
Can anybody find out? I don't know how to navigate around the DU world, but it'd be interesting to know if they tolerated such self-awareness.
I think the writer is more right than you about length of time. I think America began to drift toward Socialism when Europe did (early part of 20th Century, definitely between World Wars). 30 or so years ago Goldwater's Revolution began and took root with Ronald Reagan who gave it wings. I date the beginning of the Reagan Revolution about the same time as the writer does, when there was a gentle to rolling to (now) sweeping shift back to the ideals of our founding fathers. In the respect that we're moving back to them, you are right. In the respect that the country had moved well away from them, the writer is correct.
MHO.
Yep. This guy's still a moron, he's just a moron who understands that most Americans are not morons.
The first step to recovery is recognition that a problem exists.... :-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.