Welcome all you losers, loners, and early Saturday morning workers at home online at 12:00pm on a Friday night over there on the east coast and 9:00 out here in sweltering Southern California. Glad to see there's other people out there like me. Why else would I be at home thinking about how fucked the world is and why this is all happening right now, right when I'm hitting the prime of my life? Why else would I be wallowing miserably in my hot-as-hell Valley apartment instead of being out at a fancy air-conditioned bar in Hollywood swallowing ten-dollar drinks with starlets and the suave? Why else would I be geeked-out, obsessed with how much better the world would be if only the mothers of conservatives had drilled into offsprings' brains a simple saying that, whether or not they know it, liberals live their lives by and conservatives despise.
It's the stuff of blues songs and cliché yet it might just be the twelve words that'll teach us how to stop worrying and love life again. I welcome you to spend your time with me right below my spiffy moniker and those eight dots.
That saying being: don't judge a man until you walk a mile in their shoes.
This age-old maxim, completely ignored by the fire-breathing Right, holds the clues to the innate differences between liberals and their ideological counterparts. Liberals at their core have much more EMPATHY while conservatives operate with much more RAGE. We see the world through kind and caring eyes, while they look out of self-righteous, self-serving orbs.
Conservatives don't wear strangers' shoes. They refuse to even try them on. They scoff at being asked to. They're so deficient of empathy they replaced the word with something a lot more confusing and unappealingly academic. A word much like a dog whistle, in which only listeners of Limbaugh and followers of Hannity can hear it, and it drives them crazy. Moral relativism. While liberals see people who are different than us and see suffering and universal similarity, conservatives see a people whose main fault is not being more like us. Even the Europeans, whose governments and ways of life, in the grand scheme of the universe is practically indistinguishable from ours, draw their ire and have thus become their quasi-enemies. Freedom fries anyone?
If only they'd walked a mile in a stranger's shoes.
I know it's a common argument, and a popular one around here, that we need to be much tougher and fight Republicans like angry dogs. I myself have written whole diaries that were such call to arms, and in a way this one is too, but tonight, with war breaking out in the Middle East - I mean, more war - and the Koreans ever pesky and ornery out in Asia I'm asking, if when we take a stand we plant our feet firmly in peace and love and understanding, instead of stooping to their level and launching, however gratifying, futile verbal attacks. Believe me, I've made them and will probably break down and make them again.
Like the weather in New England wait five minutes and I'll probably hit them with a thundercloud of rhetorical lightning bolts.
Like: What the hell were republicans thinking these last five years? That we were going to walk into Iraq, completely collapse their social order, destroy their infrastructure, carelessly stomp around in our jeeps like it's Stripes while building our fourteen bases and get showered with rose petals and such gratitude from the incoming government for their virgin democracy that they would give us all their oil for a song and for a long, long time.
If only they had thought about the hundred thousand innocent Iraqis whose lives are now in another realm instead of mocking their over-hyped belief that 72 virgins will greet them there. Imagine if America was defined by Warren Jeffs and Colorado City? We're looking at the same numbers there, same percentage of the populations. I'm not denying that their radicals aren't much more armed and dangerous, I'm just saying 99% of the population in Iraq didn't want to go to war. War came to them.
Last week a video came out with our soldier's corpses looking and being treated all sorts of terrible. Too terrible to watch yet you read Red State and what you'll read is a bunch of conservatives claiming every American should, actually should be forced to, watch the video. It appealed directly to their sense of rage and rage they did. The fact that this act was in retaliation for the rape and murder of a 15-year old girl escaped their notice completely. Not to mention the murder of the rest of her family. An eye for an eye, I guess. Don't get me wrong, terrorist tactics are wrong, morally reprehensible, and unimaginably, counter-productively stupid. But so is pre-emptive war.
Next time we need to shorten that slogan to pre-empt war.
Walk a mile in my shoes. Minimum wage. Let them get another job.
Walk a mile in my shoes. Drug addicts. Toss them in jail and throw away the key. Unless it's oxy-contin and you're a big fat fatcat.
Walk a mile in my shoes. Taxes. Let's pay less and leave it up to our kids and their brats. Anyway they should pay for the war we're waging for their survival.
Walk a mile in my shoes. Social programs. We shouldn't be wasting our bomb and missile money on education and health care, if they're too poor to get cancer that's not our problems. I didn't tell them to get a minimum wage job. And if they're too hard up for cash to pay their parking tickets then we should make those double those fines if they're not paid within three weeks.
Yes, I'm blaming conservatives for $45 dollar parking tickets in Los Angles. You can starve the beast but the beast will still get some licks in. It has to fight back to survive. Isn't it easier to just fully fund local governments Isn't it much easier to feed the beast, train it, put it to good use than to Andrea Yates it through a tragic combination of hubris and ineptitude?
We're supposed to trust them in war just because they rattle the saber louder and whenever they please, but when a hurricane came through the Gulf Coast, taking a city, and a culture and three thousand Americans with it they didn't do nothing but criticize Sean Penn for renting a boat and getting out there to try to help. He didn't blame them for not having the means to blow town. He didn't stand on a bridge with a shotgun. What did Charlton Hesston do those dark nights last October but fingerbang his rifle? Much less Limbaugh or Hannity. Even Joe Scarfuckinbough shed some tears. The only other time I've seen a republican cry was when Duke Cunningham got busted making millions in bribes.
So now that all their stubbornness and cold-hearted refusal to empathize with the Palestinian cause is literally blowing up in their face it's time we fight back with some peace mongering. We should assert our arguments of compromise based in love, in compassion, in reason. Love is reason. But before we break out in kumbaya I'm not someone who believes war is over just because you want it. In fact it's probably harder to stop war than to start it. I never liked that saying because it doesn't tell you how to achieve that end. Still, avoiding World War 3 seems like a worthwhile gamble right about now and an easy call to make. I'm tired of being told war for the sake of peace. How about peace for the sake of no war? It's time we evolved. Like a wise-ass CEO might say, it's time we think outside the box. We should shout it affirmatively, proudly. We don't want no more war. We want peace, justice, equality. It's who we are. Look at the leaders on the left conservatives fear the most. The leaders that spoke ballsy of peace and brotherhood. Common concern. The Ghandis. The Martin Luther Kings. The Nelson Mandelas. Even the Howard Deans.
We've been tricked into talking tough. Playing their game. An eye for an eye. Hell, I've done it plenty. It's time to simply state: We don't want no more war.
If you argue for humanity you can't lose. What happening to erring on the side of life.
We need to say to both sides to just fucking cool it. There are other solutions. Peaceful solutions. We haven't even really tried.
While Clinton was trying to make peace the republicans were impugning him daily on the airwaves for getting a piece. Oslo was thirteen years ago and it's the closest we've come. Bush likes to say let history be the judge. Well, fuckers, eight years after you indignant pricks tried to impeach him for an act of affection (okay that may be stretching it) your boy wonder has merrily set us down a path of Armageddon through an act of illegal war with catastrophic unintended consequences.
What do you have to say for yourselves?
If only we had been more resolute about peace back then as we are about war now the world might be a bit safer. If only we had walked a mile in a Palestinian shoe through the dusty Gaza streets in the shadow of a wall that makes you a prisoner in your own home we'd have fought a little harder for a mutual solution. If only we spent half of what we spend on weapons to hurt people on tools to help people, our country might be a bit better place.
If only conservatives would walk a mile in a stranger's shoe. And I haven't even mentioned Immigration. Anyway, thanks for spending some of your Friday night with me. Hope I didn't piss you off or bum you out too much.