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The
War on America
August 27, 2002
By MHLovecraft
America
is under attack.
There are those that seek nothing less than the total annihilation
and remediation of the ideals, processes and practices of
progress. They call into question the patriotism of those
who dare dissent. They assert that we hate America, the Constitution,
life itself. They seek to dull the sharpest of wits with vitriolic
ink. They want to stall, repress and obfuscate the efforts
of the many and the few.
Wake up, good people of America. The conservative right is
leading a savage and surreptitious campaign against us. What
have we done to warrant their fury? What is it about us they
despise so strongly? In what we are, in what we want to be,
in what we strive and seek are planted the seeds of their
hatred.
We seek to recognize the dignity and freedom of all living
human beings.
We seek to make a person's right to choose his or her own
path inviolate.
We seek to make the human body the site of personal dominion.
We seek to alleviate misery, suffering, poverty and pain.
We seek philosophical, scientific, and moral coherence.
We seek to dispel ignorance and intolerance.
We seek the pursuit and development of intellect.
We seek a future free of toxic water and land.
We seek sustainability.
We seek nature's grace.
We seek no respite in the status quo.
In seeking these things, we have made and will continue to
make mistakes. We have had our failures, but we have had our
victories. They are Americans, no less than we. We as Americans
live to try, to achieve, and to evolve. We all have the right
to exist. Don't we?
We are sitting back and taking it all - every vitriolic attack
of punditry, every poisoned pen, every executive's wink and
nudge, every righteously derived edict. We are practicing
what they purport to as we continually turn the other cheek.
We continue to hope that logic and progress will prevail,
vindicating us in their eyes. We want to be accepted by them.
We want to be congratulated in making things a little better
at least some of the time.
But it may be that kind of hope that spells our demise. They
push, we fall back, they push again and we fall back more.
We attempt to placate and convince and persuade them that
we are not bad people, that we are not traitors, that we do
love our country just as they claim to do. We attempt to honor
and respect their rights, as we only want them to do for us.
Alas, they want none of that from us - they do not care and
they never will for our line of thinking. They cannot be persuaded,
assuaged, deterred or even distracted. We on the other hand
find new things to occupy our thoughts, never looking over
our shoulder at the ground they are gaining on us. One day,
and this is their most fervent hope and desire, they will
overtake us and extinguish us, until it is only they and their
institutions that exist.
They detest us. They are everything they accuse us of being.
They are everything they claim to oppose.
They seek to scourge the very surface of the planet clean
of us. It is not even as subtle as it once was. There was
a time when we believed we had sensible discourse and debate
as our arenas for democratic battle. The most sacred institutions
of our existence as America - the Congress, the Presidency,
the Judiciary - have been screwed up against us and no one
is doing a damn thing to stop it.
They accuse us of activism, of subverting - nay, perverting
- the Constitution in some kind of nonsensical cabal wherein
our goals are to turn all of America into a homosexual, Gaia-worshipping,
soft-bellied, baby-killing, gun-grabbing, land-snatching mob
of Gomorrah rabble. How ludicrous. How absurd. How puerile.
Yet they have successfully framed us as the destroyers of
the American Way. And we still have not armed ourselves against
their lobby and rampage.
They have varnished themselves in a patina of victimhood,
reacting in fear and loathing to our sincerity and tolerance.
They answer only to themselves. They are dishonest and selective
in their defense of any sacred text, both religious and secular.
Shielded in moral certitude, some wield religious symbols
as proof of their infallibility, but they have merely to change
the angle or grip of these items to make of them sharp and
stabbing weapons.
They define liberty and refuse us the same franchise. We
have been fools to think that there is any way we can share
in a common dream. There is no common dream if in fact there
ever was one. They are winning a war in which we refuse to
accept that we are not only participants, but also intended
targets.
America, we are under siege.
What is happening to all that is good in America? Where are
the true patriots, those willing to stand before these persecutors
and refuse their false promises? America, we are under siege
by zealotry masked as freedom. What should be our battle cry
in dark times as these?
It is they who are tearing this country and its most beloved
Constitution apart. It is coming time for them or us to pay
a steep price.
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