|
Can we save 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 is a writer and human rights activist in Seattle.
To The Editor
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Via E-mail
Re: Editorial by Wendy E. Smith
Sir,
If Ms. Smith wishes to understand people like me, she should start by not calling herself a “human rights activist” while talking like a bigot. If she would understand me she should stop using my term for myself, Christian, like it’s a swear word.
I’m not sure any of us can communicate with some one whose mind is as obviously closed as Ms. Smiths, but I’ll take a stab at it. I’m pro-life because I believe that unborn children have a right to live. If you think you need to have a choice, accept that choice by saying “yes” or “no.” I know you will bring up rape and incest. If over million women a year are being raped, we need to do something more effective than killing their children.
I support the current military actions because I believe that some things are worth fighting for: self-government, a woman’s right to learn to read, religious freedom, the right of homosexuals to know they aren’t going to die by having a brick wall pushed over on their heads.
Ms. Smith calls herself a human rights activist, but doesn’t seem willing to lift a finger to advance those rights. But she is correct on one thing. I don’t understand her.
Jeffrey A. Thomas
Some people can't think for themselves so they vote democratic
|
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
