...and for good reason. If I thought that conservative or (what is called) moderation would cure our nation's ills, then I would support it. I don't because I think it's been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that such philosophies have failed.
Mein, I am frequently quite bemused by your rants. That's not saying that I think they're illegitimate. Obviously, some of them are just outright weird, but I'd wager that you hit the nail on the head 70% of the time, albeit in a rather haphazard way.
What's so amusing about your freak out sessions is that if you remove the propaganda you fill your head with from Alex Jones and various other screwballs, you'd be a leftist. You're already against the Patriot Act, which you would never question if it wasn't for progressives. I'm pretty sure you're against the wars in the Middle East. You already channel a certain democratic socialist who wrote 1984. Hell, the only difference between your positions and my positions when I was 19 years old is that I was reading Chomsky & Huey Newton.
It's amusing to me that us leftists threw a fit back in the 90's over free trade, and said American jobs would be lost. Now that those jobs are gone, conservatives like you admit that free trade wasn't such a good idea after all. Hey, better late than never.
"why don't you get up off yer fat, stoned-out ass, man-up and do something about all the sort of stuff I write about"
I've done that until I'm blue in the face. I still do, but my activist life has had to be scaled back now that I have a mortgage to worry about.
The reality though is that there are few options for guys like us. We can call our representatives, which I do frequently, and I've given quite a few meager staffers an ear full more times than I can count. Of course, unless that is organized, it's a useless effort. I helped to organize such a cause, and let quite a few people know that the congressional switchboard number was (and this is true) 1-866-SOB-U-SOB. Of course, after a while, they just changed the number. And there went 6 months of pain staking organizational efforts.
You could get out on the streets and protest, but with far too many protesters thinking that peaceful protests are the right thing to do, then politicians can just as easily ignore it. The only way to get noticed is to take things a step further than that, and no one is willing to do that. And if that's not enough of a downer, you gotta dodge police batons. Once I realized that self-defense was an inherent right, I figured my self interest would be better served to skip such gatherings until other leftists realized they needed to be armed. There goes that effort.
None of this would be a problem if we had any kind of direct democracy, where none of these efforts would be necessary. But alas, that's about as popular an idea as herpes.
So the only other option left is to wait for things to get horrifically worse and start selling torches and pitchforks at the Capitol South metro station.
Until a larger number of Americans realize that freedom is never given, it is taken, then for the most part I'm going to sit on the sidelines.
The bigger question is, when are the far too comfortable going to realize that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable."
All I know is that I'm going to make a bundle with all that stock I bought in the Acme Guillotine Company. Isn't capitalism grand?
-- Modified on 12/9/2010 8:57:44 PM
