Back in the olden days I was a liberal, a dyed-in-the-wool Democratic-Farmer-Labor worker bee with a history of hippieness and a natural flair for raging feminism.
It's never been easy to be a liberal in this country. Conservatives have pushed for decades to make it a dirty word, and in the last 30 years they've fully and completely succeeded. We call ourselves Progressives, now. As usual, Democrats folded, conceded the power to the nutcases on the right. We found another word, apparently hoping to be vague enough to avoid further assaults on our fundamental beliefs. That's worked well, hasn't it?
I'm pretty much done with that shit. I have a sense of what it means to be a liberal, to believe that we're all in this together, that we are responsible to one another, that we as a society have responsibilities that we must carry as a group. At this point I have no sense of what Progressive means. The loudest progressives appear to hate progress - nothing short of perfection will suffice. The Big Tent Democrats once took pride in seems now to be an annoyance to those who want what they want, when they want it, without having to consider more than one side of any given issue, or with no comprehension that real life is necessarily more complex than we'd like it to be.
I still read quite a few diaries a day here but seldom recommend more than one or two, and rarely comment anymore. Some days I read the Wreck List and think "Frank Luntz must be creaming in his jeans." I wonder how many people he's paying to spend a little time spreading the hate here and there on the intertubz. We're not even a line item in the budget, either, because it's so easy to pull us off track and get us focused on non-issues - 2 or 3 well-placed operatives on every blog, maybe? Petty cash.
What depresses me the most, though, is the general air of hopelessness and decay. I don't tend to buy hopelessness. I know that there are battles to fight, and that most of the time we'll move ahead less quickly than I would prefer, but I have an eternal hope burning brightly. I believe that if I keep talking, keep pushing, keep voting, keep writing, I'll change a mind here and there, and that's a huge victory. It's the skin world I'm concerned with changing, but I do miss having a feeling of working with like-minded people on improving things beyond the blogosphere. I used to have that here. Not so much anymore. It's a surreal experience for me, reading the same memes again and again, having the same commenters throw the same phrases into the same diaries day after day. Maybe the activists have all left and what remains are the disaffected, I don't know.
I know that Conservatives are what they are, which is what they've always been, which is why they're called conservative - all change is threatening to some people, and most of the threatened aren't able to overcome their fear enough to recognize that what they have isn't really working so well. My job isn't to hate them, to mock them, or to make them go away. My job is to keep reaching out, to share a story, to smile and wish them well, then work behind their backs to change things no matter how they feel about it and, finally, be there to help them see how this might just be better than what they had.
The Republicans have a really easy job - engender fear, stir hatred, and use your power to gain more power. Democrats take the harder road. We have chosen to live in a larger world, with lots of grey areas and lots of different ideas floating around. Except lately we're heading toward the Republican end of the spectrum, and that really distresses me. A bully is a bully. Wooly thinking is wooly thinking, calling it Progressive doesn't improve it.
It's always going to be harder to be on our side, folks. The Republicans have one simple agenda - enrich the rich. We have a far more complex one and we've been fighting this fight since the dawn of the Republic. This particular period is NOT the worst the country has ever faced, it's just another phase in the eternal battle between the haves and the have-nots. Check your history before you leap into the chasm of internet despair.
Next time you read a diary about President Obama being a corporate tool, a sell-out, weak, conservative, blah blah blah ask yourself who benefits if he's undercut by his own party. The corporatists are terrified of him, of his effectiveness. They're using you to ensure that the status quo is maintained. It's Marketing 101, and we're the target. I wish it was a less effective campaign. I thought we were brighter than this.
I'm starting with taking Liberal back - I may be Don Quixote but I'd sure like to see the back broken on that particular marketing scam. Maybe a little success in that area will embolden us to start pushing for those changes in HCR we wanted to see in the first place. Or we can just keep drinking Rupert's kool-aid.