Reply #54: and then after Clark dropped out I wrote...

[m berst]

It has been sad watching the Dean and Edwards campaigns collapse. Talking to their supporters, I hear the same despair from them that so many Clark supporters have been feeling.

I have been hanging with the Kucinich people, but hope is starting to die there, too. I can't find a political organization to be involved with, and our attempts to keep the old LFA people together has not been very successful. The Kucinich people are facing the same challenges now, and are asking each other "what now?"

I am feeling like 3 strikes and you're out. The stampede to the official Clark campaign - strike one. The crushing of the grass roots people - strike two. The stampede to Kerry - strike three.

There is some talk among Kucinich supporters of third party efforts. While I do think that there is a good possibility that the two parties will break up and reform into new parties, I don't think it will happen before November. The usual arguments are going on about working within the party, the danger of splitting the progressive vote and thereby giving Bush the election, the importance of staying true to your convictions, etc.

I am amazed at how quickly and thoroughly the national debate has collapsed. It seems that people want to close their eyes, and open them again in November to discover that it was all just a bad dream. Kerry will be elected, and Kerry will turn the country around and save us and we won't have to worry anymore. I certainly hope they are right, but in any case the real loss will be that if they are not, there will be nothing to fall back on.

I have no problem in principle rallying behind opposition to Bush, but why did that have to also mean the breaking up of the grass roots organizations, the end of the national discussion, and the crushing of people's hope and enthusiasm? That makes me suspicious of the DNC and the Kerry campaign. They haven't really been telling us to pull the lever for Kerry - which is all we are good for to them - rather, we had to stop talking and organizing, as well. Be quiet now, or you are helping Bush!

We were privileged to be part of a moment in history when many people had great hope and were reaching out to each other. My only hope now is that things don't get too rough for everyone in the coming years.

I think we will now see a bitter partisan campaign and an even split in the electorate, as we did in the last national election. It will play out in the mass media, and we will be reduced to spectators. We will be hearing a lot about gay marriage, I am afraid.

I was politically active in 1968. That year Eugene McCarthy ran an insurgent campaign in the Democratic primaries, and then Robert Kennedy jumped into the race and was close to having the nomination won when he was murdered. The party met in Chicago for the convention, and in defiance of the people's will nominated the party's choice, Hubert Humphrey. The city was like a war zone throughout the convention with thousands of demonstrators in the streets. George Wallace then entered the race as a third party candidate and siphoned off a critical number of Democratic voters, and Nixon won the election by a tiny margin.

I tell this story for purposes of comparison. There was quite a bit of discouragement, sadness, and hopelessness over the events in 1968, and that created a pall that hung over the country for decades. Yet I am seeing more discouragement, sadness, and hopelessness now then I did then. That is stunning to me.

I believe we are, figuratively speaking, living in the eye of a hurricane. I hope I am wrong, but the signs are there. For decades, right wing xenophobes have been peddling the line that "they hate us" in other countries. The irony is that "they" - overwhelmingly - didn't hate us until the xenophobes grabbed control of the government. Now, more and more people around the world do fear and hate us, and I am not just talking about people in the Middle East. Thank God for the European press as a "reality check" for us here, or we might succumb to the comforting illusion that things are just fine and that we are a bunch of chicken littles.

I stumbled onto the Sean Hannity radio program accidentally the other day, and was preoccupied with something else and let it run for a few minutes. I heard that "liberals are traitors" that "liberals want the terrorists to win" that the teacher's union is a "terrorist organization" that "liberals hate America and American values" and on and on in that vein. This is a national radio show with a huge following, and the host was demonizing half of the people in the country. This is pure hate, and it won't just go away, it will continue to poison people's minds. Substitute the word "Jews" for the word "liberals" and it could have come right out of Joseph Goebbel's ministry. The Nazi analogies are way overused, but not in this case.

But there I go again - shooting my mouth off instead of rallying behind Kerry.

Reason, critical thinking, and discussion having failed, we will now be forced to live the truth rather than to talk about it. We are about to find out the hard way whether we have been right or not.

Perhaps things will be just fine. Perhaps we were all worried about nothing. Perhaps life will go on without any major disasters. Perhaps the lessons from history don't apply this time.

It is an enormous gamble.