I'm the last person on the planet that you'd call mainstream. OK, I have some "mainstream" qualities about me... I have a business degree and a white collar job, and I very occasionally go to Starbucks (sometimes I actually buy coffee instead of just using the bathroom and leaving)... I think that's probably where my similarity to mainstream American culture ends. I have no TV, no X-box, no DVDs. I've never had a Christmas tree. I don't go shopping at the mall if I can avoid it. I speak Chinese. I buy my food directly from farmers I know. I am weird.
But I think my values are pretty normal. So what I'm wondering is: Am I the crazy one, or are they? And by THEY, I mean the Dems in the House and the Senate. Join me over the flip to see what I mean.
Is it just me, or did America elect the Dems in 2006 to end the war? Nobody likes the war. Nobody wants this war. And yet, people are still dying. What is sadder than being the last person to die for a mistake, is dying for a mistake and having hundreds or thousands more die after you for the same stupid mistake WHEN WE ALL KNOW IT'S A MISTAKE.
UPDATE: A reminder from your friendly Meteor Blades that it wasn't a mistake. It's sedition.
I met a Marine back in May and I asked him about the war. He wants Obama to win in November, he told me, because he wants the war to end. He's already been to the Middle East a few times. He comes from a military family and each of his brothers went over there several times too. He just volunteered to go back. He said if we're there to help them and they shoot at us, then we should leave. I AGREE.
You'd think I'm crazy, that I'm in some small fringy minority, the way the so-called mainstream media and particularly those we've elected to office treat this issue. Am I? I don't think so.
When it all comes down to it, I think most normal Americans have the same values. What do we want? Living wages, safety, jobs, adequate transportation (whether that means a good bus system or good roads and gas prices that we can afford), safe food, clean water, clean air, good educations for ourselves and our kids, health care... is this all so much to ask for?
Every single politician likes to promise these things to us, but too many of them do it George Orwell style. You know, they'll give you the "Healthy Forests" act that gets rid of the forests, or the "Clear Skies" act that (as Al Franken says) clears the skies of birds. They'll make up terms like "clean coal" as if that makes the coal clean. But it doesn't.
Sometimes people are fooled... but not always. Ethanol's a good example of that. It's pretty darn obvious that ethanol's a DUMB idea. It's no energy solution. If it takes almost as much oil to make the ethanol as it saves... what's the point? And people get that. They get that even BEFORE they get the devastating environmental impact of growing more corn.
There's some debate over the impact of ethanol on food prices, and people are tuning into that too. I'm not sold on the idea that ethanol's making food expensive, because it takes so much oil to make our food, when oil's expensive then food's expensive even before you consider ethanol. I don't have an answer there, although I know the Grocery Manufacturers of America believe that ethanol raises food prices.
The point is, ethanol's dumb and people know it. SO WHY ARE BOTH MCCAIN AND OBAMA PRO-ETHANOL? WHY? Is it because Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, and Dupont are pro-ethanol and Burston-Marsteller (yes, Mark Penn's PR firm) is helping them sell it? This shit is right out there in the open. Why do they get away with it?
And then there's the ideas that I have that are downright "radical." Oh, it's "radical" to think that there is NO reason whatsoever to have commercials during kids shows. What about the corporations' rights to free speech? As Michele Simon, one of our panelists at Netroots Nation said to me, what would you say to a salesman who came to your door and requested a private meeting with your six year old? Probably the NICEST thing anyone would do to that salesman is slam the door in his face. Yet it's radical to think that there is no reason to allow advertising to kids - ESPECIALLY in schools. I just don't get it.
Is there some mainstream out there that I'm not seeing that thinks the FISA bill was a great idea, the oil industry needs subsidies, ethanol might work (oh - and so will drilling!), we need to stay in Iraq, corporations deserve unfettered rights to whatever they want, and bla bla bla all of these other so-called "mainstream" ideas that Congress is supporting for some reason. Am I the crazy one here or are they?