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.