I'm writing this to the people who don't believe that the South, and parts of the Midwest, and states like Alabama and Texas and Oklahoma and Kentucky and West Virginia and South Carolina will ever change.
My point is simple. When you believe that nothing will ever change, then nothing ever will.
We're locked in a battle for the hearts and minds of Americans. There's a lot of hate and a lot of misunderstanding out there, and we are making some very encouraging gains.
But even still, there are comments about how some areas of this great country should be written off. The people who live there are lost causes. They're ignorant. They're sexist, racist and homophobic. They will never change their minds.
Let me tell you about one mind that was changed.
Some of you already know that while I was never technically a Republican, I might as well have been. I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. It was the first election I took part in. I would have voted as a registered Republican but for a technicality that I won't go into here.
I laughed at Al Gore. I thought he was a sissy. At my church, I wasn't quite taught that it was OK to bomb abortion clinics, but that it was an understandable action. I hated gay people. I don't use the word "hate" lightly. It was real hate. I wanted them all to die.
If the nation could be brought back to God, and the Christian faith exclusively taught in schools, then things would be better, I thought. If only these namby-pamby Republicans would get tough on these traitorous Democrats.
Then some people from half a world away, who had similar ideas, captured four planes and changed the world.
I thought long about this event, and what it meant. If my ideology allowed for killings in the name of a higher calling, and so did theirs, then what exactly separated us except for the individual faiths we both practiced?
I went back to church one day and my pastor was talking about the potential for war against the Muslims. He said there would be deaths -- even deaths of women and children. While he never came right out and said it, the subtext was clear to me. "Don't concern yourself with the lives of these nonbelievers in Christ."
I imagined Osama bin Laden himself giving his recruits a similar talk, only with the name of Jesus substituted with the name of Allah.
I left the church. When I say I left the church, I don't mean that I filed out with the rest of the people after the altar call and the donation plate. I mean I stormed right out the door as the pastor was speaking. I went straight home and wrote him a letter explaining why I had left and why I wouldn't be coming back.
We continued to write one another back and forth. It was kind of an exorcism of my former beliefs, to co-opt a religious term. As I became active politically, I began to plan rallies in opposition to the Iraq War, which was then being talked about.
I even met some gay and lesbian people, whose decency and humanity convinced me that I was wrong about them. They were no more moral than me, and no less moral. They were simply people.
That is the point I want to make with you today -- You may think you know everything you need to know about the people of the red states. You might think that you understand exactly how it is in Tuskaloosa, Alabama; or Smyrna, Tennessee; or Tupelo, Mississippi; or even my own Tulsa, Oklahoma.
You think you know these people. You think they're ignorant and hopeless. You think you're so very goddamned different from them. But let me tell you that it isn't so.
People are just people. As Jim Cacy said in Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," there's some things that folks do that's good, and there's some things they do that ain't so good. But that's all a man has a right to say.
They're not so different from you. They are your brothers and your sisters. And were you born where they were born, don't pretend that you'd be so very different either.
So please don't forget about your brothers and sisters in areas of the country that have been written off time and again by so-called "progressives." You may think yourself mighty open-minded, but when you call an entire city, or a whole state, or even a region of the country "racist," or "hopeless," or "a lost cause," you are only revealing your own prejudices.
It's time to make inroads. It's time to look past the superficialities and acknowledge our common humanity. Things may be different where I am than they are where you are, but I am still a human being with a family, and some people that I love. I still have bills to pay and a job to go to. I still have a home and plans for my future.
It's time to show people from those places we've written off that we want to help them. Not by pretending that they're inferior, but by treating them as equals.
As we make these inroads, we will find some people who will not listen. But we will also find some people who will, perhaps as I have, surprise us all.
NOTE: I'd like to thank Kossack doribell and his or her diary for inspiration.