Homestead mailing list

["Toni Hawryluk" <tonihawr AT msn.com>]

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