Sportsdude wrote:
Its a growing issue something you probly haven't seen because you live outside of the country or grew up on the west coast where this trend is not common place.
The family members I was quoting live in the mid-Atlantic seaboard region and adjacent Midwestern states, and I last visited them in 2003. I am still in touch with some of them (though not the cousin who raised money for Rick Santorum's first campaign, but most of the others) and they feel the same way as they always have. I can say the same for people I know who still live in the Deep South and Southern California who vote Republican. It's an economic issue, period.
I also have known a lot of self-described "born-again Christians" who have their own personal ethics but personally disagree with a lot of their church "leaders" in that they don't believe that they have a right to inflict their beliefs upon others . . .
Canada has been slow in areas but that was eons ago (maybe not from your perspective but from mine it certainly is).
You try living here as somethings besides a white male and then you can talk to me about this issue.
There has been a cultural shift to the hard right and if you can't see that well I'm sorry.
Sweetheart, I hate to pull rank, but I'm probably old enough to be your mother. I've seen more, experienced more, and I lived in a lot of different places in the US (some not far from where you are now). I know something about where you live and I understand that it's miserable (the last time I travelled through your hometown I was shocked that the clerk in the gas station/convenience store I visited actually had a smoldering cigarette next to her, and that I had to inhale her fumes—this was only three years ago), but it doesn't necessarily represent the whole Midwest, the whole US East of the Rockies, or the whole US in general.
If there's anything I learned from the Reagan-Bush era of the 80s it's that it is the most vocal and fascistically well-organised (in modern terms, the sheep-like religious Right) that get their voices heard—but it is a true "silent majority" (to make ironic use of Nixon's reactionary terminology from the 60s) that populates the US and makes up the more moderate bulk of the population. Why do you think that the last two Presidential "elections" were expected to be so "close"? Is it perhaps because the huge number of swing voters not only can't make up their minds between two truly abhorrent candidates, but also because they don't fit into the kind of pigeonholes the media (and you) want to put them into? That's a far cry from the lockstep jackbooted Christian activists that you (and the media) are portraying to the rest of us.
I'm reminded of a recent German movie I saw about the WWII period—forgive me if I can't remember which one. A character who suffered under the Nazis was asked why he didn't leave. His answer: "I was waiting for the Germans to return." In other words, the ones who weren't total fanatics and the stupid sheep who just followed along with them. That's the way I look at the American people—and I believe that, despite all the bullshit that's happening now, the better part of us will prevail. Just as some college students I knew in the early 80s thought that the world had come to an end when Reagan was elected, and found later that all was not lost.
I'm just finishing up a biography of Germaine de Staël, the famous 18th- and early 19th-century saloniste whose career predated the French Revolution, and whose republican sentiments and writings caused her to be exiled by Napoleon. A passage I read the other day from this book particularly struck me:
"Compared to what the world has known since, Napoleon's régime seems mild and humane; but to one who remained faithful to the hopes of the eighteenth century, the world of 1810 was a nightmare of brute force. War was permanent: it had gone on for eighteen years. From Spain to Poland, from Amsterdam to Corfu, French soldiers were garrisoned, levying tribute and imposing the will of one man. With the Continental System and the blockade war had become total, with no end in sight, engulfing all human energy: the arts had to glorify the régime; philosophy and education must function as tools of conformity; science was enlisted to create synthetic substitutes. Resistance was punished by demotion, exile, imprisonment and, in the conquered countries, the firing squad. The year 1810 marked the beginning of a new phase in systematic oppression. Napoleon created state prisons, where inmates were held without trial, decreed drastic new censorship laws, and deprived the Church of its last vestige of independence. The Pope himself was arrested and hustled off to Savona. If his plans had succeeded, said Napoleon in 1816 [in other words, after his defeat—in case you didn't know], he 'would have become the master of the religious as well as of the political world.'"
That was just five years before his defeat. Since then worse despots have gone down as a course of history and general opinion against them. Bush and his machine will go down too.
Don't tell me I don't know what it is or where it comes from because I've seen it too. And it's here in Canada as well, as much as you'd like to believe otherwise.
But it will not prevail. Simple human decency dictates that. If you're really worried about that, then get off the computer and do something real in your own community—or go to one in which your efforts can bear fruit.
Just as the border insulates me from living with the Christian Right 24/7, so your geography isolates you from those as near as the Northern Midwest (and yes, I am in close contact with friends there, too) who believe as you do.
One last point: even my friends in the Midwestern US are shocked at the kind of sexism I've had to deal with here in Canada. As a white male, you are in no position to comment on the kind of oppression and regressive attitudes I've confronted here. I have made part of my living in a male-dominated field since long before I left the US, and I have never encountered the repression and shockingly outdated views of women that I have here in Canada—and if you put yourself in my shoes for 24 hours you might sing a different tune, you little pissant.
