First, I want everyone to watch this....
Now, I hope that everyone feels the way I feel when I watch that. It is simply a video of a guy who traveled around the world.
I feel such hope when I watch it. I don't know whether it is the music, the pictures of a guy dancing horribly around the world yet enjoying himself, or the pictures of him in so many different cultures and locales. But it gives me hope for the future, that life is worth living, that there is much more to this world than violence and despair.
And now I am going to attempt to segue that into a plea for unity, peace and calm here at Daily Kos. For when I experience the feeling of hope, I want others to experience it too.
We all have so much in common. We agree more than we disagree. And this year, with progressive people power taking over the Democratic Party bit by bit, we have an amazing opportunity.
As much success and potential future success Democrats, progressives, and liberals are enjoying at the moment, we always seem to lapse back into our infighting.
Recently, the whole Israel-Hezbollah War and the revelations that a Green Party candidate sought and accepted Republican donations to get himself on the ballot have torn Daily Kos asunder. Still others are angry at the focus lately on the Lamont-Lieberman race. There has even been disharmony in Cheers and Jeers of all places.
I want us all to work together, and sure, I want all of us to be Democrats and work to advance, reform and change the Democratic Party so that it is not only the party that we all want, but also the governing majority party for generations to come that we all know it can be.
Some of you are not Democrats and indeed oppose the very idea of the Democratic Party. You work against it at times. You refuse to learn the lessons of the past. You refuse to join in the reforming of the Party as you are more comfortable criticizing from afar.
It is difficult for me to understand, and I in fact hate it. The ones who are destroying my sense of hope and who are preventing others from experiencing it as well are not the Republicans, but those here who feel they are too morally superior to join in the grunt work of reform, who will never compromise, yet who will gladly vote Republican out of spite and take Republican money to prove a point.
If you are not here to experience hope, if you are not here to change the Democratic Party, if you are not here to defeat Republicans, and if you are not here to work together with your potential allies in politics, then you have to leave.
I was glad to see a certain Kossack post a GBCW diary tonight, out of frustration that her views on the nobility of the Green Party and her defenses of a candidate's recent actions in Pennsylvania were not taken seriously. She is who I am talking about. She is not here to help us. She is not here to help Democrats or change the party. She has her own opinions on politics, and that is fine, but it is good she has left, for she is a malignancy to what we are attempting to do here and within the party. She, and others like her, are sucking valuable oxygen and energy away from our efforts.
If you are not here to work with the Democrats, to change the party for the better, to vote out establishment enablers of President Bush and incumbents who too often ignore their constituents, then Daily Kos is not for you and you should leave.