I have the privilege (or disadvantage, depending on your perspective) of living in a blue state with many blue friends while having mostly red family members and many red friends as well. Unfortunately this does not allow me to peacefully wallow in my own opinion buttressed by nothing but confirmation of my inherent rightness. I'm forced to confront the reasonableness of the other side as well as the fact that generally they're just good people.
Sadly, it appears that many of my friends, family and acquaintances are not in this position and feel much freer expressing serious contempt for the "other side". And I don't think they know they are or mean to, or perhaps they are expressing contempt for "those other people"...whoever they are. Regardless of your perspective on how the country should be run, being inconsiderate of other people's ideas isn't exactly helpful. In fact, isn't the best way to listen very carefully to what the other side has to say so that you can both come up with the best of both worlds? If nothing else it's important to note that if millions and millions of people think something, shouldn't you pause to just consider it? That many people cannot be that dumb. Otherwise our society wouldn't have lasted even as long as it has.
Anyway, it'd be great if our disagreements would involve a little more listening and a lot less malevolence.
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Ah, my very young daughter, it is so wonderful to see how you view life in your short life and begin to realize how you have arrived at your current opinions and perspectives. We who have been around longer and disagree with your views do not do so by personal attacks or derision only that your experiences in education and upbringing seem to had the primary impact on these opinions.
I disagree with your views and opinions on basically three fronts:
1. It seems to me that you speak in platitudes and generalities without substance or concrete examples of solutions.
2. Your demonstrative emotional attachment to BHO and his successful campaign always raises flags with me when someone is "starry eyed" rather than hard, cold calculatingly positioned. Much like Oprah who could not or would not say why she was so enamored with BHO, only that this was truly an historic period in our history.
3. And probably most important, you appear to me to be some what defensive when someone shows any type of aggressiveness against BHO. As the President-elect and soon to be the 44st President, I would suggest that you may want to thicken your skin because BHO is going to get hit from all sides and from all quarters.
Remember how vehemently your side began the Bush-hating from his "stolen election" in 2000 through the war and re-election in 2004. The amount of virulence was unprecedented in modern political science. Why would you think that "what goes around comes around" has stopped working?
I might even go as far as to say that it may reach the same level of emotional expression in both intensity and content as it did with your side towards Bush. The sheer level of hatred and emotional negativeness leveled towards Bush, his family, even his dog from Moveon.org, Media Matters, the Daily Kos were simply embarrassing for a modern political party and its operatives.
The next 4 to 8 years, my daughter, is going to be very disconcerting if you do not understand this and realize that the "shoe is truly on the other foot."
In this matter, I believe as I said in my blog (not going to mention the name here - no self-aggrandizing) the BHO administration his heavily Democratic Congress will move quickly to attempt the re-installation of the "Fairness Doctrine" in order to squash this anti-BHO verbiage. This will be the first indication that your so-called "liberalism" is truly moving towards a more governmental interventionist form of socialism.
I will and have to tell you that I for one will be there to point these personal freedom losses all along the way.
Glad to see you are back blogging, I have missed your writings and the opportunity to respond in kind. See you guys in a couple of weeks, hon.
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