Many of us have far more tact than to engage in the kind of malicious lies and ill humor we have come to expect from the sitting president and his administration. However, it is completely acceptable, and even admired among many circles, especially the ones that Bush draws his support.
The two-facedness, the sarcasm, the macho-bully swagger, and the cruelty, is a whole package has become familiar to us, and we should respond accordingly. At every step along the way, we have been shocked by behavior and actions taken by the administration, each action being more damaging and stunning than the previous one. Each day we come across more evidence, bordering upon criminal (and often exactly that, criminal), yet we have remained timid.
We have behaved much like an abused spouse, when the psychological defense mechanisms of denial, and rationale, and timidity take over in order to protect the mind when having been punched, pushed, or beaten. We have made excuses time, and again to explain decisions and policies that seem to have no rational foundation. We excuse the administration, and the President, and imagine that there are others pulling the strings, that perhaps maybe there is a deficit in communication, or mistaken information. Some Americans have become numb to the abuse, conceding his strength as an asset, and becoming codependent and therefore co-conspiratorial in the aggressions and assaults.
We have endured every kind of insult upon ourselves, and therefore upon our children, being labeled the indefinable "liberal". Liberalism, equated with "anti-American. Liberalism equated with Enemy of the State. Liberalism equated with Communism, Socialism, Perversion, and Terrorism. With its chronic use, liberalism has become a term which has long outlasted it's usefulness in public discourse, and ceases to hold any historic meaning. While liberalism has long been respected in history books, and memory, and indicated as a spirit of reform, nationalistic pride, responsible for, improved social or political conditions, it is used in contemporary circumstances solely to label and tag anyone who disagrees in public or private with the current administration. This is abominable.
Liberalism is the easy target, but who are the people behind liberalism in America? We are called treasonous, a threat, and often many other words in private, ones we should not repeat here. Every uncivil device has been recruited to cast doubt and suspicion, to lay the framework for identifying us among common company, to excuse open abuse, and justify a loss of our civil endowments.
We are reformists, concerned environmentalists, socially concerned, economically sensitive, many scientifically rational, and civically responsive individuals. We are accused of being socialists, while we are being patently robbed daily of our national resources by a few corporations.
We are accused of sympathizing with terrorists, when we rather seek to empathize, so we may seek to end terror for all times, as one might empathize with a killer, or criminal, to root out the causes from which criminality arises.
We are held out of public discourse, and meaningful participation in the political machinations of the current administration.
We are denied due process, discouraged from enfranchisement, and left out of meaningful political discourse. We are, in business, treated as pariahs, labeled as anti-business, and forced to endure memos, and other sorts of open support for the administration and propaganda during business hours.
Our children are often barraged by a stream of misleading commercials on television. In school, they are confronted with an increasingly hostile atmosphere, full of speech that is openly intolerant of our ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or political affiliation.
An ethnic enemy is more obvious, and can be thrown out of a club, but an ideological enemy? Many of us are socially concerned Catholics, Jews, Unitarians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and many other Churchgoing people, yet we are accused of being anti-religious, irreligious, called secularists, and treated heretical in public discourse, without recourse, because in Godly matters, we dare not ask for due process.
We make excuses for them, and fantasize that our opponents, are not presented with the facts as we are, perhaps not aware of the damage their ideology holds for us as a country. Perhaps maybe if they could see the risks that come with isolationism, maybe if only they understood the science, the studies, or the facts as we do, they would come to the same conclusions as we do about the war, the environment, education, health care, AIDS, economic stability, and so on. Using the term liberal Elite, we are contemptuously accused of robbing "hard working" Americans to give to the poor.
The raw power that the Republicans came to the 2000, election is something to admire, as one admires a strong opponent. We have our work cut out for us. But as God is my witness, I will never back down from a government that seeks to concentrate power into the hands of a few, hide the truth from the masses, send us to war for unjust reasons, slander the good reputations of our best and brightest, and destroy the democratic institutions that with which America has led the world.