How to Annoy a Righty Without Even Trying
I tried to compile a comprehensive list in service to the title of this entry, but there are only two things one needs to do:
Think for ones self.
Express those thought in a public manner.
That’s it! In the convoluted reasoning of the Conservative mind (is that an oxymoron?), comma, anyone not agreeable to the Republican agenda should either (a) become a political activist, or (b) forget the whole thing!
Now, I agree with the A-part. One should get out and canvas – that is if one wants to forgo responsibilities necessary to keeping one’s house, one’s kids in school, one’s job. The nasty thing is that the system we live in is skewed against the average person actively taking part in politics. Especially if that person has come into the whole political-awareness thingy later in life, has made some important and irrevocable decisions which affect how limited resources such as time and money are allocated. If every Joe would be able to affect politics directly, we would have no use for a professional political caste. Indeed, we might actually have a real democracy, which does not favor the incumbent party one bit: they’re not called “Republicans” for nothing…
But I digress.
The other choice, offered to me-and-mine by a good friend (who apparently hates my bloggings), is to emulate an ostrich. Wouldn’t that be convenient for the many-tiered aggregation of chicken-hawkishness who so favor the elimination of all independent thought: Just go away! Give up without a fight, without a voice; allow the unholy war to swallow your children and spit them out into black plastic bags (my greatest fear is for our misguided leadership to start another war – say, in Iran – and decide to reinstitute the draft just in time for my high-school-aged daughter to be swept up in the insanity and destroyed); forget entirely that the single thing that once made this country great – open political dialogue – is being stifled by the Archie Bunker clones of the neo-conservative, warhappy movement. And most of them are as guilty of armchair, couch-potato politics as I am.
To my good friend, Leucanthemum: I truly grieve that our polarity is influencing our hard-won friendship. However, I’ll be damned if your insistence on my getting some therapy will impress me in any other way than to incite my muse. Thank you for that.
May 10th, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Wow! This was quite a lot of ideas in a small space. I am still thinking about it (Archie Bunker clones of the…., etc.) Thank you for the interesting post and for reading my comments.