I've decided to try something a little bit different today. This short piece of prose-poetry was inspired by an exchange I had this morning with a Catholic contributor to DKos who seemed to me to be implying that because I was anti-Catholic, anti-Muslim, anti-communist, and a whole enormous list of antis, then I must necessarily hate about 99% all of the world's population. I told him that he needed to learn to distinguish between hatred of people (which is something I am fundamentally incapable of) and opposition to ideas-beliefs-instituions-practices which I find intolerable (something that I unhestitatingly and unabashedly afferm and embrace). I agree with something once written by Chomsky, if I remember the source correctly, who said: "Every established institution is
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illegitimate until proven otherwise." So I hope you will read this diary entry, as it is extraordinaily heart-felt and honest. I would like as many people as possible to get a chance to read how I feel about the people who participate in this forum and other progressive outlets (though I don't know any of you and live on the other side of the Atlantic).
I love you all because you are the flickering beacon of hope in the midst of an infinite ocean of despair and misery; an ocean which threatens to swallow up all of mankind in its relentless and universal onslaught.
I love you all because you are the unwavering wall of defense behind which the weak and the defenseless of the earth take shelter from the assaults of the rich and the powerful who would deprive them of their rights and coldly strip them of the very things which give meaning to human existence.
I love you all because you are the gate which holds at bay the barbarian hordes who blindly rush to reverse and dismantle the greatest works and finest achievements of civilization's greatest minds; shredding into pieces and tossing into the wind the culture of light and reason in order to replace it with the darkness of a new Medievalism.
I love you all because you are "bleeding-heart" liberals and because I know that your heart bleeds because you are deeply wounded by the cruelty and the callousness, the shallowness and the stupidity, the arrogance and artificiality, the malevolence and mendacity, and the crude cut-throat corporatism that dominates our modern world.
I love you all because you stand forth unafraid, as a mother hen when her spawn have been threatened by the wily fox, to protect and defend the universal rule of law against its detractors and defilers who inhabit the seats and bear the robes of legal authority without, also, bearing its moral responsibities.
I love you all because you speak for the speechless, holler for the homeless, cry with the hungry, bleed with the bleeding, and suffer with the suffering.
I love you all because you have given me a sense of community, of belonging and of solidarity.
I love you all because you have restored to me, a complete stranger living in a faraway land facing a devastatingly difficult period of trial and tribulation in his own life, a sense of participation in something greater than himself; a renewed will to live and to struggle for the sake of others; and, above all, a small hope that even the smallest contibution can, perhaps, make a meaningful difference in people's lives.