General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: To those bemoaning the presence of the divine in the inauguration [View all]JoeyT
(6,785 posts)Especially if we had something you wanted. (Doubly so for me, being a mongrel and all.) That goes back before the founding of the country and ended...well, if you're a corporation it still hasn't ended, they're just politer about pushing you out of the way, but the right to do it for regular people only ended in the last century or so. It was also traditional to take our children and indoctrinate them into Christianity while forbidding them from speaking their own language so they wouldn't grow up to be foul savages like their parents were.
Tradition is the diametric opposite of progress. All progress has to be clawed from the clutches of people that scream about how important tradition is. The idea that we should always do things a certain way because we've always done them this way would have us eating our rancid meat raw and sleeping in a tree so the wolves couldn't eat us.
No, I was never my own worst enemy. The hicks I grew up with that I was in constant fights with over not going to church until I finally quit/expelled from high school were my worst enemies then. People that enable that kind of stuff are my enemies now. (Not you or anyone on DU. That's all on Republicans.)
Basically my argument is "Fuck tradition and fuck precedent. He had to do it to keep a bunch of people from going nuts and that's fine. I'd have done it too.". Hrm. I wonder if invoking deities so people won't go nuts has become a tradition too?