Across the great divide!
It has become very apparent that there is a great political and social divide in this nation as we speak. And, although there is some geography involved in it, to a great degree, its boundaries are philosophical in nature. We have become so polarized that people living next to each other refuse to speak, such is the divide brought about by their politics.
We were having lunch at a local restaurant frequented by travelers along the interstate highway system the other day when we happened to end up sitting uncomfortably close to a pair of individuals who were apparently traveling together but not married to one another. We sat quietly by and listened to their conversation. It went something like this: “I have my pistol by my bed and my rifles downstairs. I want to be able to defend myself when they come. There is a revolution coming in a few years and I want to be ready for it. I want to have my chance!” The fellow who made these comments was old and white and very, very fat and we thought that if he was going to be one of the soldiers in the revolution that we might have a chance of winning. After all, liberal democrats are sprout eaters and thin and usually in shape for the fight. The liberal sort do not want or pick fights but are usually the ones who end them when they are enough aroused to do so.
When we were a kid, we were, as a nation, mostly all in this thing together and it stayed that way until the 1960’s when Barry Goldwater (AUH2O) ran for president and made the famous statement that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” There had always been the conservative nut cases out there like Phyllis Schlafly but they didn’t have a national voice until Goldwater came along. We suppose that the extreme nut cases like the predecessors to those like the Koch brothers had been around all along but it was the liberalism that began under Franklin D. Roosevelt that brought them all together and forced the catalyst that formed the nucleus of the current conservative movement all those years ago. They tried to defeat Roosevelt in the thirties and they tried to defeat Kennedy in the sixties and they tried to defeat Obama in the new teens that comprises the cycle that this century has been.
We have often stated that it is our deeply held belief that this group of not so suddenly resurgent nuts have a plan to supplant liberalism by the time that we celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of FDR’s election to the presidency in 2032. We are not sure, but we feel that the great culminating event and the thing that they hate the most about the whole liberal movement is the fact that they elected a negro president. That was apparently the last straw but it only further enhanced the efforts to destroy liberals and everything that they stand for. The world of the nineteen thirties before Roosevelt and the great depression had very little regulation to it at all. There was an income tax and there were some child labor laws in place but there was no social security and no Medicare and no minimum wage and no safety net as we know it today in place at all. And that was just fine with the ancestors of today’s conservative extremist nut cases that we face. They lived in a privileged world apart defined by their wealth and everyone knew and more or less acknowledged that fact.
Negroes lived in shacks in segregated communities or in defined ghettoes and went to their own churches and gays and lesbians kept very quiet about what they were about and mainly lived in large cities or in university communities where there was just a little bit more tolerance. Women stayed at home and kept the fires burning as they lived out their lives thankful that they finally had the right to nullify their husbands vote if they so desired with the secret ballot. After all, they had only had the vote for a little over a decade at that time. Manly white men ruled the world back then and it was a fine place to live if you were a manly white man. In the circles of the rich, they gathered at their clubs and gyms and admired what each others physiques looked like as they compared notes about their ability to make money either in the stock market or in more or less regular businesses, if they worked at all. Managing their inheritances was a great occupation for so many of them.
Screwing the average worker was not an issue because everybody was screwed before they ever began to work. There were no pension benefits of any kind at all. When social security began, the projection was that the average recipient would only live eighteen months after sixty five. We had a personal friend who died about twenty years ago at around the age of ninety who once told us that when unionization brought vacation time in for his workers he was opposed to it vehemently until he saw what it did for their attitudes. This new group of conservatives could give a shit about that!
We fought the last good war in the forties but those damned negroes insisted on flying planes and attacking our white counterparts--the Germans. It was a repeat of the Civil War when they insisted on fighting our white counterparts--the southerners. But the wars ended and we went back to the old ways. But then came along Branch Rickey and his Jackie Robinson and even baseball wasn’t even safe anymore.
In the eyes of the conservatives, it was mainly the negroes fault that all of what happened later happened at all. Eisenhower sent troops into Little Rock and the Kennedy’s of Massachusetts turned on us completely, especially Bobby. In the early sixties they ruled in Engle v. Vitale that we couldn’t have prayer in our public schools and that one case alone changed the whole landscape of education and the resultant society in this nation.
All of these liberal ideas were destroying the conservatives world and they made up their minds to do something about it all. And they used the one tool that they had an abundance of--money! As is usual with all movements, the liberals over reached in their later stages and the conservatives had a multi generational plan to take advantage of every opportunity given them. Their great opportunity came with the election of Ronald Wilson Reagan and conservatism came to full flood tide during that period of time. The unions began a retreat and even the mentally ill were turned out onto the streets. But perhaps the most important thing that happened was the cancellation of the Federal Communications Commissions equal time and fairness doctrines which opened the floodgates for conservative media to flourish under the rule of the likes of Rupert Murdock and his Fox News and newspaper empires. The Internet also played a key role because it gave conservatives an even playing field and an even start in a new form of communications that everyone was starting from the beginning with. The old traditional newspapers dominated by liberals began to die away and their investigative staffs that had fought so hard against corruption began to die away with them. We spoke to a man recently who once worked as an editor of a major metropolitan daily who once had a staff of twenty people under him that has now been reduced to a grand total of one. He has gone into the ministry!
The great force working for conservatives before Roosevelt was isolation in all of its many forms: social, political and the like. With things like what have just been mentioned such as the Internet and the death of a unified mass media comprised of three television networks, that sense of isolation from the common whole has been reestablished and reinvigorated by the conservatives. With a sense of isolation comes the ability to tell big lies to the isolated and the conservatives have been great at doing that. The prairie commentator Garrison Keillor has stated that republican conservatives are “Christians of convenience” and it has been very convenient for them to use their religious ties to foster a political base to oppose liberalism in all of its forms. If the Engle case wasn’t bad enough, Roe v. Wade set the conservative world aflame with its apparent disrespect for the right to life as they perceived it. Now the conservatives had the excuse to abandon the mainstream world because it did not teach the right “white” thoughts and was killing babies right and left. It was also convenient to attack science after the conservative dominated economic machine had polluted the atmosphere to the point of causing global warming and harming the water and the land. If you could attack evolution, they you could deny everything and so they did from their sturdy bastions of private Christian schools and universities which taught blind obedience instead of the ability to think objectively. Also, many conservatives had pulled their children from public schools and had begun the process of home education which was, in effect, the blind leading the blind.
And so, here we are, facing off against one another in what my seatmate at the local restaurant called the coming civil war. And you can believe that the once conservative nut cases have a very careful plan to restore us to a pre Roosevelt world in which the rich are well cared for and the rest pick shit with the chickens, to recoin and old southern Illinois phrase. As Goldwater said: “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” and the conservatives have adopted practically every vice in their attempts to restore the world that they once knew. There is no compromise in them and they would just as soon establish their own nation as to continue down the road that the rest of the nation is traveling upon. Recent voting right suppression schemes enacted by the southern and other red states in the wake of the cancellation of key elements of the voting rights act only prove that conservatives are not willing to live and let live. They want the world as it once was where women stayed home, blacks knew their place, and Latinos picked fruit in season and then went back across the border to Mexico and beyond.
As Abraham Lincoln said before the last great civil war: A house divided against itself can not long endure. Since this seems to be the conservative credo, liberals and progressives and others had best be getting ready for the great conflict, such is the state of our affairs.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
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