Do we talk? Or do we kill one another? And if we elect to talk, are we so afraid of reason and evidence that we must exclude some... marking them for extermination?
I'm going to make this short.
This is our choice. We talk. Our we kill what we don't like. Who wins? No one. ... everybody loses.
To engage in dialog does NOT mean to surrender standards of reason and evidence, but to hold those with whom we disagree to share in those standards.
Too long we've lived in and accepted the Propaganda World, as though neither reason nor evidence mattered, but only spin.
Invite your "enemies" into the conversation... but hold them to the standards of rational discourse, and they will either cease to be your enemies, or become your allies... if not your friends. Isn't this what Obama has been saying about foreign policy?
If there is to be any meaning to the promise of "change," there is no more fundamental change than the one that lets us put behind us the RayGun/Bush/Cheney neocon deterministic ideology that denies that anything new or unexpected or unpredictable can happen, but that we are always and forever trapped in the past and the patterns of the past.
We talk to one another. We say: here is what we need to live. What do you need?
And then we carve out painful compromises... that lead us into the future.
What else does "government of the people, by the people, for the people, mean?
Either that... or we kill off the opposition, and know damn well that's what they plan for us.
We listen--yes! ... to the most abhorrent claims. What we don't do, is give up our belief in reason and evidence. And if we don't, we have nothing to fear.
Only if we marginalize those most dangerous fringe groups do they become a danger--or if we succumb to communication by propaganda... like what we've seen for the last several generations.
Warren's impotent plea to his impotent gods is no threat... not in the context of a process based on reason and evidence and dialog. He is only a threat if we drive him to the margins where he can thrive, sucking up the irrational and unassimilated and unchallenged ignorance and hatred of those who feel they have no claim to a place in the greater national dialog.
And the last word will not be his...
Let's get beyond the politics of division and propaganda... that's what change means. If it's to mean anything.