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but a few months ago I wrote an article for a county newsletter about being liberal. Rather then write a new response, I'm going to cheat and C&P the article. soooo..here it is:
It's hard to be a liberal. We have to be at the front of every issue when it's unpopular, and we get little or no credit for its success when the rest of the world finally catches up.
You can't tell us by our political labels. For example, just in the relatively short life of this country we've been called both "Republicans" (in Lincoln's day) and "Democrats" (since FDR)!
But whatever we've been called, we've been around since the dawn of time, and it's pretty easy to find ourselves historically.
We're the folks who rose up against the ancient Egyptians, crying, "Let our people go." We were the thinkers who rattled the Greek elite with our questions about truth and virtue. We were the fishermen following a barefoot guy whose radical ideas about kindness and equality got him executed by the imperial authorities. Ever hear about the people, in this hemisphere, who objected to sacrificing virgins in exchange for good weather and happy volcanoes? That was us, too.
In more recent generations, the movements that ended slavery and lynchings and promoted civil rights and advanced womens rights and improved the quality of life for the world and all of its people...all of that stuff was us. We stormed the Bastille to overthrow the French monarchy, hid Jews in our attics during Hitler's reign, helped Cambodian professors masquerade as farmers to avoid Pol Pot's genocide, rebelled against Communist dictators in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Lithuania, and secretly educated our daughters under the Taliban.
In every case, we did it against fierce opposition from the conservative side, and, like now, they usually managed to make their objections religiously-based. The Pharisees said they were cracking down on "heresy." Inca priests insisted the gods needed the blood of virgins. Kings claimed a "divine right" to rule as they wished. Hitler asserted that the Almighty was on his side and prayed, "Lord God, let us never hesitate or play the coward." The Taliban waved the Koran as its authority to impose everything from dress-codes to public rapes and stonings.
In 1845 the evangelical conservative element of the Presbyterian General Assembly wrote that slavery was based on "some of the plainest declarations of the Word of God," and of course they believed that the liberals who objected to slavery were anti-Christian. Throughout history, conservatives--in their efforts to maintain a "god-given hierarchy" that put them in control of other people's lives--have managed to find moral righteousness in atrocities that ranged from relatively mild oppressions to mass murder. And also throughout history, the movements that finally brought society out of the darkness and into the light came from liberals.
It would be a lot easier for us liberals to take if people would look backwards and say, "Wow! Thank God for those liberals! What were we thinking!!!???" Unfortunately, that's not how it works.
Change happens so slowly, and in such a complex fashion, that it really doesn't show up until it's so far behind us that we've all rewritten history. We ourselves tend to give everyone the credit for having moved forward, and we exonerate the foot-draggers and resistors who--whether out of ignorance, fear, or gullibility--held us back. Even the carpenter who led those fishermen, 2000 years ago, forgave his tormentors from the cross.
I suppose you could say that's the political downside of our liberal mind-set that advocates tolerance and forgiveness. But our humane philosophy is such a key platform in our view of an ideal society that we can never afford to compromise it. Besides, it works. The teachings of Christ and Socrates--neither of whom ever wrote a word that survived--changed the world far more than those of the Pharisees and the ancient Greek hierarchy (whoever they were!).
These are incredibly frustrating times for us, because the world is in desperate, critical need of progressives.
You know what we're up against: Domestically, we need alternative fuel sources, safeguards for the environment, and a way to modify our economy so that it won't be shattered if the world becomes less oil-dependent. We have to halt the rapidly widening "income gap" and restore meaning to the American Dream. We need to figure out how the world's richest nation can match the health-care of less-wealthy civilizations. We need to regain the educational superiority we've lost to a long list of other countries. We must quit letting the military suck up the majority of our tax-dollars. Perhaps toughest and most crucial of all, we must make our own votes, as citizens, more meaningful to our legislators than the campaign-donation "votes" of corporations.
Globally, this is a time for great diplomacy as China emerges as a major power. We must find coolheaded ways to de-escalate volatile situations such as international terrorism instead of escalating them with thoughtless reactions. We need intense planning for dealing with the new global economy--planning that may entail sensible regulatory constraints on the very corporations that now rule our government. We need to restore our moral leadership in the world, salvaging it from the serious damage it's suffered in recent years from questionable elections, favoritism to the few over the many, unprovoked war, casual imprisonment without trial, indefinite suspension of our civil rights, and torture as a military policy.
The world of progress belongs to the liberals. But instead of being in a place where we can rise to the occasion and meet the needs of the world, we find ourselves without power, and blocked by the shortsightedness and fear of change that is the world of conservatism.
Keeping the faith in this environment is easy to say and hard to do, but I know that we will, because we're the liberals. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in "The Great Gatsby, "..and so we beat on, boats against the current.." The rest of the line says, "borne back ceaselessly into the past," and that's where F. Scott and I disagree a little, because I do believe we make constant--if sometimes imperceptible--inroads into the future. It's a great line though, and one that runs through my head fairly often these days. It's hard to be a liberal. It's frustrating, and there are few rewards that seem obvious at the time. But historically, we can look back and see all the massive and wonderful changes we've implemented over the years, and how very much the world depends on us.
".. and so we beat on, boats against the current..."
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