Dear Progressive: The Family You Have Is Not PURE! Your Dilemma Is Discussed Below.
O ye Blue Ones! Whence come ye? We spring from many springs, yes we do. But for a minute, I say put yourself in my shoes, this very minute in time! Ride along with me!
I shall make you a magic blog ride to get you to the present. Just hang on for the ride.
Pretend you're a kid from Wyoming. Early '60s. Just pretend.
That's how I grew up. Trailers and Right Wingers and shit. You know, Grover Norquist People. And I still love Wyoming BTW.
I've turned out toally lib, and my brother in the above video is still in the Navy, and has become a warmonger.
Let's just move on. To 2007 in fact, and let's skip the rest of the movements in 2003 and so on.
I obviously WANT PEACE! That's October 2007.
So, we move into the 2008 US Primary world. I hear this:
Unity is the great need of the hour - the great need of this hour. Not because it sounds pleasant or because it makes us feel good, but because it's the only way we can overcome the essential deficit that exists in this country.
I'm not talking about a budget deficit. I'm not talking about a trade deficit. I'm not talking about a deficit of good ideas or new plans.
I'm talking about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.
We have an empathy deficit when we're still sending our children down corridors of shame - schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education.
We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can't afford a doctor when their children get sick.
We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others; when our children see nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree today, in the present, in the twenty-first century.
We have a deficit when homeless veterans sleep on the streets of our cities; when innocents are slaughtered in the deserts of Darfur; when young Americans serve tour after tour of duty in a war that should've never been authorized and never been waged.
And we have a deficit when it takes a breach in our levees to reveal a breach in our compassion; when it takes a terrible storm to reveal the hungry that God calls on us to feed; the sick He calls on us to care for; the least of these He commands that we treat as our own.
So we have a deficit to close. We have walls - barriers to justice and equality - that must come down. And to do this, we know that unity is the great need of this hour.
Joy to my ears! I respond with this:
Months pass, the primaries end, and we get this FISA position from Obama- Note Kos's Position:
And yet I slog along. Let's go forward again to the Convention.
During the Party Conventions, Dem and Republican, my Dad is at my house. During that time, a couple things happen I show my dad the post I wrote thatDigby linked to.
And we go off on our merry way to our Ancestral Land, you know the 40 Acre and a mule type land where the Canfield's had established homesteads. In Wyoming. Near Sundance. And we shall sprinkle my sisters ashes.
Yes.
My dad was just not as all right wingy after all this. And guess what was next?
Hello? Pivot and Attack
More Pivot, more Attack
Now, let' look at 2009.
Obama won the 2008 election you know; just making sure we're all the same on that.
Here's the Point: With all of the above, I really don't think my dad voted Obama in 2008. But I do think he was totally AFFECTED in 2008.
And even if my Dad isn't changed, in any way, do you expect me to exclude him from my life, in any way, since he's a Right Winger?
I won't exclude him. He's my dad. I'll just vehemently disagree with him, but love him and move on. I'll just point to our mutual leaving of Wyoming, as I have, and tell him he's a dumbass, as I've done, and expect that We Will Still Love Each Other.
Purity tests have no room in my fly-over house. And I really doubt that purity rules your family either.
Gimme some nuanced thinking here. I'm no "teabagger" and I'm no Norquist lover. But I do love me some Justice.
Not only that, I demand it.