Saturday, December 27, 2008

Republicans love America more - NOT! a reply to Joel Stein in the L.A. Times

by RW Spisak
Hobe Sound, FL


If your Mother, is downing a couple quarts of Vodka and smoking three packs a day, you don't show your love only by lighting her cigarettes, and doing her liquor store shopping or even picking up some Oxycontin to mellow her out!

And if the liquor is oil, and the cigarettes are greenhouse gases and the shopping is rampant unregulated speculation and the Oxy is PROZAC & Testosterone Fueled Foreign Occupations, you don't do that either.

Liberals, aren't too busy counting her accomplishments, to see what work still needs to be done. When Liberals hear republicans preening about "Americam Exceptionalism", it often sounds to us, like the General so happy about yesterday's victories that he forgets to post today's sentries.

What Liberals love about our great human rainbow of an experiment in Liberty, is our forward looking humane perspective. We honor the hope of mankind that has made America so desirable a destination. America is beloved by Liberals among its many glories because it has redefined inclusion and has made a commitment to have no state religion. It is in our Constitution, it expresses the founders spirit of ecumenicalism, a tolerance for all religions.

America is a thought experiment in Liberty writ large. The promise of freedom to children of every color and every creed. The promise of the end of the ancient brutality of slavery and the nightmare of KINGS, and EMPERORS. Instead America embodies the enlightenment's ideal of the innate worth of every woman and man, the nobility of every child, not based in a blood line or established by the length of a line of credit.

Has America's every promise been completely realized? Can we love her, only if we say she is flawless? No, and Liberals do not as some suggest, glory in her imperfections, but instead we see her in her yet unfinished and malleable youth. She remains still capable of learning and yet a lttle rambunctious in her mere 232nd year.

BLIND UNTHINKING UNQUESTIONING LOYALTY, demanded by Kings and Emperors was not required by our founders. They didn't see it as a harbinger of a clear-eyed assessment of where the future might lead. Let us look instead, with open honest eyes when other Americans refuse loudly to be honest about our failures, and misjudgments. Whether this refusal stems from conspiratorial rascality or simple dimwitted laziness, it is beneath the true American spirit. America is made better when her sons and daughters have the clear sight to make what improvements must be made. Jefferson called revolutionary change a right, a responsibility.

Bloody rapacious capitalism at it's worst, must be tamed from time to time in this cradle of freedom, lest all the widows and children be consumed in the fires of greed. The free market untamed may be the best nursery for greed, but it often fails to honor the hopes of the humble. Should the highest price possible in the marketplace be the baseline for health care, for college education, for even basic education access.

The liberal anti-capitalistic suggestions of "POOR-RICHARD" for free libraries and free public education as well as public service fire departments were in fact not designed to track market indices, but these ideas are also part of the dream of America. Clara Barton, John Steinbeck and Margaret Sanger, Sinclair Lewis, and Susan B. Anthony, these critics addressed a audience who hoped to build a better more caring America.

America encompasses the dreams of Frick and Rockefeller to own it all, which stand side by side with Ford's desire to make sure every American could own a horseless carriage and Carnegie's generous gift of Libraries and Museums a gift not just to the children of the poor in his time, but a timeless educational resource for millions of young Americans. America has been the home of the Madoffs and the Gates the Yin and Yang of wealth and property and she is the home to millions more whose dreams lie yet aborning. Liberals love them too and when Health Care as a human right comes up for a vote, it may not be the dream of the GET-RICH-QUICK boys but access to quality healthcare is an ALL AMERICAN DREAM too!

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