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  • From: "Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>
  • To: "Homestead mailing list" <homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Homestead] two Americas
  • Date: Tue, 9 Nov 2004 13:08:57 -0800

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/198423_firstperson08.html<http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/198423_firstperson08.html>



Monday, November 8, 2004

Can we save our country from its leaders?

WENDY E. SMITH GUEST COLUMNIST

John Edwards is right. There are two Americas, and they don't intersect. They
don't even appear to understand each other.

When I woke up on Nov. 3 and switched on the radio, that realization hit me
like a ton of bricks.

Contrary to my predictions, we had had a relatively fair election and the
American people (or something over half of them) had democratically voted for
an extremist Christian regime.

I had the radio tuned to NPR, which was hosting a national call-in show. The
first caller was a Bush supporter from Tucson. He expressed his frustration
that he didn't have a real choice in presidential candidates and was forced
to vote for a candidate whose policies he didn't completely support.

As a progressive, this sounded very familiar to me but the man had said he
was a conservative, so I paid attention. Did he want an even more right-wing
candidate to vote for (if such can be imagined)?

No. It turned out that he had wished he could vote for John Kerry but
"couldn't possibly ever vote for a candidate who isn't 'pro-life.' " He said
that until Democrats understood the overriding importance of such "moral
values," they would never win in the red states.

The next caller was a woman from Pennsylvania. She had been busting her butt
for Kerry for weeks and was now in despair. She stated that she simply
couldn't understand the people who had voted for Bush: "These people want to
control what happens in my bedroom, in my body, but they are A-OK with us
having killed 100,000 Iraqis, and mounting. I just don't get them."

That was when the bricks hit. I felt lost. I knew what I was planning to do
in the case of a stolen election (civil disobedience in the service of saving
our democracy). I knew what I was going to do if Kerry won (give him three
days to rest and then start pounding on his door with complaints about his
Middle East policies). But, I had no idea what to do now.

For months, Kerry has been conspicuously going to church all over the country
and shooting ducks and geese like crazy in between -- all in an effort to
convince the people in the red states that he "gets them."

It was all in vain. No amount of avian carcasses would have helped.

Half the people in this country believe in a god who forbids stem cell
research but seems to have forgotten his own First Commandment.

In the other America, we believe that killing all those Iraqis (not to
mention Afghanis and, indirectly, Palestinians) is not only wrong but also
terribly hazardous to our own security. We have different "moral values." And
we don't give a rat's ass what other people do in their bedrooms.

But we, my friends, are not in the majority.

We in that other America had better learn to speak our own morality, which is
a humanistic one, in an emotionally convincing fashion. More important,
though, we had better take a good hard look at what is happening in the
Christian extremist America, dissect it and try to understand it from the
inside out.

I don't say this because I believe we should manufacture some anti-abortion,
pro-Arab-and-Muslim-killing candidate who can make inroads in the red states
in 2008.

I say it because we had better get a grip on what we are facing, in order to
figure out how to save our country (and the poor, suffering rest of the
world) from the crusade on which America is embarked.

Wendy E. Smith for the Post Intelligencer




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