Second Thoughts -- Part II

My dear ones, here are more of the fruits of my ruminations over the past few weeks.

How many of us actually think to distinguish our anger at today's donkey-ass Democrats and our opinions of liberals in general? Do we often stop to realize that the two categories are no longer one and the same?

I have been guilty of this myself. I have railed at "the liberals" and "the Left," without remembering that (A) not all of them are Democrats and that (B) a great many Democrats will have nothing to do with them. I'm mad at the Democrats -- one of whom I am no longer -- not at the liberals, with whom I have really never parted. In the interest of fairness, I would be wise to remember that, too.

Now I have another question, and I don't fare too well on this one either. How many of those of us who are angry at the Democratic Party and its toadies have been unduly swayed by the Right's smear of liberals? A closely related question would be, do we even realize the extent of the smear? It's been going on for twenty-five or thirty years, now, it's very well-orchestrated and it's funded by many of the richest people in this country.

Is it really true, for example, that "all" liberals favor big-government intervention into every area of our lives? We certainly don't think it's a very good idea when the conservatives are in charge of it. Nor do "small-government" conservatives seem at all opposed to it as long as THEY are in charge.

I still say we liberals do a lot of stupid things. Holding up picket-signs that say "Stop Racism," for example, instead of working to eradicate it. I think we blundered our way into all this big-government tyranny because we imagined we could control it forever, and that this has a lot to do with why the Right has such a huge and powerful governmental apparatus with which to tyrannize us today. Not resorting to force to get our way when we'd better serve our cause by persuading people is always a good idea. My lean in the direction of libertarianism has existed for a long time, and it will surely continue.

But what WILL they do about Social Security? I can't claim I want to see it abolished, after all those years of having paid into the system, without the government honoring the promise it made to provide me with an income after my retirement. I also think the libertarians are wrong if they think that screwing everybody out of the benefits they've been paying for all their working lives is going to make people more likely to support libertarianism. Far more likely, it will merely lead them to blame the libertarians.

I've never had a conversation with a libertarian that didn't drift off into a pretty pipe-dream about how well his (almost always it's a his) ideas would work -- if this were this way, and that were that way, and if, and if, and if and if and if and if. Libertarians claim to be hard-headed anti-utopians, but they are the biggest utopians I have ever known. I fully agree that if the world operated exactly the way libertarians think it should, life would be better for almost all of us. I think it would be lovely if we could all ride around on unicorns, too. The former seems about as likely to become reality as the latter.

How, at the very pea-picking least, are we ever gonna even begin getting from here to there? If you can't even answer that, then SHADDUP.

This country is in the hands of fascists. If we don't wrest it away from them, in another few decades it will no longer exist. Let's get rid of the menace that's trying to destroy us all, and THEN we can go back to dreaming about utopia.