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Edited on Thu Jan-06-05 10:38 AM by Plaid Adder
I only got about 30 seconds into it before leaping out of bed and shutting the damn thing off. Here's how they framed their little spot on those kooky Kerry hold-outs:
"After two months, even the most die-hard Democrats have taken down their signs and peeled off the Kerry/Edwards bumperstickers. They haven't moved to Canada. They're no longer in therapy. They've accepted the reality of a two-term Bush presidency. But this small group of ..."
What a condescending pile of steaming CRAP!
And the reporter's tone of voice just made it all more infuriating. Hey, honey, you know what? I may not be camped outside Kerry's house in the snow, but I have NOT accepted the reality of a two term Bush presidency. His second term may be *unavoidable,* but it is not and ain't never going to be *acceptable.*
And you know what, honey? I'm still in therapy. And yes, it is partly because of this election, and no, it's not funny.
It is one of the little ironies of therapy that the people who actually get it are often not the people who REALLY need it. A lot of the time, what people are doing in therapy is learning how to deal with damage that has been done to them by people who were, or still are, FAR more fucked up than the person who's going, but who for precisely that reason will never look for help. Kids go into therapy because their parents should have, and didn't; wives go into therapy because their husbands should, and won't. A lot of what happens in therapy is people learning how to cope not just with their own problems but with the problems created for them by horrible situations which cannot be fundamentally changed, because the person affected by them doesn't have the power to do it.
And that is why people went into therapy after losing this election: because we know that for a long time now our country is going to remain deeply, deeply sick, and we have to figure out how to live here without getting sick ourselves. Bush is the one who's bugfuck nuts; but since he's running the country and we're not, we're the ones who are going in for treatment.
And, of course, there is the other little peculiarlity that many Democrats share, which is that we care about and are sensitive to the sufferings of other people. What this means is that shit that our conservative brethren accept as just 'the way the world works'--poverty, injustice, racism, the horrific deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis in a gratuitous imperial war waged by our own leaders, the horrific deaths of hundreds of our soldiers in a gratuitous imperial war waged by our own leaders, the horrific deaths of a hundred thousand people in the poorest part of the world during a natural disaster whose impact could have been mitigated if they'd had a decent warning system--has a real and severe emotional impact on us. This is good, in that it is what motivates us to try to change things; but it is dangerous, in that it can also get to the point where it's overwhelming. Our challenge as progressives is to retain the capacity to feel all this pain without letting ourselves be disabled by it. And I'll tell you this, it's not easy.
It's a lot easier to just bounce around saying, "Oh well, who cares about all that bullshit, it doesn't affect me and what can you do anyway. Tra la la, oh look, the market's coming back!" But we do care; and that's what they always make fun of us for. That's our stereotype, isn't it: we're all a bunch of naive bleeding-heart idiots for caring about causes that are supposed to be ridiculous precisely because they don't directly affect us. We don't get it that self-interest is the only acceptable motivation for anything. We're just children who don't understand that all that matters in the world is money and power and trying to get as much of it as you can so that YOU can be the one screwing everyone else instead of getting screwed yourself.
You want to run a stupid spot ridiculing people who are still refusing to accept the election results? Fine. I hope you will enjoy your spot in the history books after this is all over. I look forward to finding you in the index under "death of democracy, role of bootlicking media in." How about going down to the Capitol to talk to John Conyers about what really went on in Ohio? How about putting in a call to Triad Systems to see if they can explain things? How about doing a little fucking digging? Because after all, we would all just as soon NOT believe that this election was stolen, because as you will notice, we find that very painful. But since you bastards refuse to do your job, and we therefore cannot trust a single goddamn thing we hear from you about what happened in November, and therefore we still don't know whether we're currently suffering through a short-term nightmare or the beginning of the end of representative democracy, we're still shelling out for therapy.
Finally, Ms. Perky-Voiced Correspondent, I would recommend that if you really want to understand this, you go back in time, flip your orientation, and spend 16 years living as a lesbian in this fucking country. Go through the 2004 election cycle. Get beaten up in public by your country's leaders for months on end and then go on NPR and tell everyone how funny you think it is.
You want to make fun of me for giving a shit? Fine. You go ahead and do that, and I'm sure the folks over at Free Republic are passing this message around and having fun with it too. And to you, and them, I have this to say: you could not PAY me enough to be a person like you. The more you close yourself off to the suffering of others, the more of your humanity dies. I would rather be fully human than happy. Right now, being fully human is really fucking painful; but we'll deal with it. We're used to it. We are all out there working out our own strategies for survival in this disaster, and one of my strategies, henceforth, is going to be to add NPR to the list of mainstream media outlets to which I will no longer expose myself.
:argh:
The Plaid Adder
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