.. But I just read your remark..""You, sir, are a great American" and it was, as I understand it, to a Bush supporter..
Actually it was to a third party supporter, it seemed to me. Maybe one of those libertarian wackos.
This seems so typical of Republicans on SI.. Anybody that is not conservative, politically speaking, is not a "Great American"
Huh?
A true American, embraces all.. not just middle to upper class White people, voting to save a couple of bucks on taxes..It also embraces our environment.. Our wonderful "life support system".. not just a few National parks to drive to the overlook, glance over and leave tissue flowers along the way, for the "underclass" to pick up..
Well, that is the sort of characterization that really p*sses me off. Do you really think everyone who voted for Bush did so "to save a couple of bucks on taxes?" Were they all White people? Do none of them care about the environment?
Maybe you can explain to me how non-"White" people have benefitted from the Democrats' education policies. Are the inner city schools any good now that Clinton/Gore have been in for 8 years? Were they any good in 1968, when Kennedy/Johnson were in for 8 years? When Republicans proposed allowing inner city families to escape their awful school systems which were their only "choice" by giving them their tax dollars to direct to the school of their own choice, Democrats screamed like stuck pigs. They apparently did not trust their own consituents to spend the money wisely. And so in the awful schools they stayed, and with education the one really good route to success in America, most of them had no chance.
To presume that those who voted Republican are smug rich White assholes who don't care about anybody but themselves is offensive and just plain wrong.
Let me tell you a story, of someone who is not White. Someone who voted for Bush, though she is Independent. Someone whose family's per capita income was one-fourth of the U.S. poverty level when she was born. Someone who, when other kids were playing computer games, watching reruns of bad sitcoms, and running around without parental supervision, was being drilled by her parents in math, science, English, reading. Someone who, though not brilliant, could not come home with less than an A unless she wanted her parents to focus hours every night on bringing those grades up higher. Someone who did not know any English when she turned 8.
That someone is now almost 40. I would guess that she has voted Republican in maybe 3 of the last 5 elections. She also obtained admission to and graduated from one of the top schools of medicine in the country, despite the "handicaps" she was given to start with and despite having only attended public schools her entire life. She spent the weekend after the election with one of our daughters, camping in the wilderness. And didn't leave any tissue paper behind for some self-labelled member of the "underclass" to go fetch.
The reason the Democrats have such trouble winning elections anymore (eight year incumbency with a booming economy, and it comes down to this?) is that people don't buy into this labelling stuff anymore. I am an individual. Maybe I'm one color, maybe another. Maybe male, maybe female. Maybe straight, maybe gay. Who cares? What matters is, am I responsible? Do I have integrity? Do I treat others well? Do I make the world a better or worse place for the other inhabitants of the planet? Will I make a contribution, however modest, that leaves those that survive me better off than if I had never been born?
The answers to those questions have nothing whatsoever to do with my race, my gender, my sexual orientation, my union membership or lack thereof, my profession, or really anything that seems to matter to the groupthink party. I am married to someone of a different race. What "box" on the census form was I supposed to check for our children? When they apply to college, if we are still in the throes of this nonsense, what box should they check? I will tell you what I will advise them if they ask.... check "other", and if there is a place for a comment they should write that their race is "human". For in the end, that is what we all have in common, despite the rhetoric of division we have been constantly exposed to over the years.
Pluralism to me does not mean defining people by what groups they can be assigned to. It means treating them as individuals, providing them opportunities and imposing obligations regardless of where they come from or what they look like or who they want to sleep with. And it means taking the trouble not to paint with so broad a brush that 49 million people are instantly branded as not caring about anybody else but themselves. |
