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RoyGBiv Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 12:59 AM
Original message
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year
Edited on Sat Jan-02-10 01:09 AM by RoyGBiv
I battled with whether to make this a response to Nance's thread because it is part of the inspiration for this. But, it's more than that, and I had a basic idea of what I wanted to say before I read her, hopefully temporary, farewell to DU. This is mostly "stream of consciousness," not a thought out post. I'm just sharing here ...

I spent the holiday at my mom's house in Oklahoma City. From the moment I left my apartment for the drive from Houston there, I had in my mind that I would not think much about politics for the next several days. Before leaving I posted my thoughts in the African-American group on the prejudiced attitudes of many self-proclaimed leftists. I read the comments, posted a thank you, and left it there. Some part of me felt it would be one of my last substantive posts to DU. I'm tired of this nonsense, tired of the people who think that by being participants in this forum they are somehow involved in a rebellious movement against "the man" and who do little else than attempt to spread their nihilism.

I don't like nihilists. I have no use for them. I'd rather spend all my time around Sarah Palin worshipers than people who don't believe in anything but blowing up the world just to prove some bizarre point only they care about.

But my time away from DU helped me regain some perspective. Perspective is the key.

I realized about the time I posted again a couple days ago, exchanging a few barbs with people I will no longer apologize for calling idiots, that I was spending far too much energy worrying about what people thought of what I say here, specifically people who do nothing but spread their negativity and don't seem to have the first clue about how to effect positive change.

I'm better than that, and I won't apologize for saying so. Most of the people in this sub-forum are better than that too. I make this judgment not from a like-mindedness of view on President Obama, but from having paid attention to the comments that have been made over the years by many of you. I'd really like to call a few people out here, in both good and bad ways, but I won't in the hopes this won't be deleted. Suffice to say I believe we can all point to several prolific posters in GD and GDP who've never found an issue they couldn't complain about yet who have never offered a single bit of constructive advice on what to do about it, and I think all of us know many people in this sub-forum who have done and do quite a lot in an attempt to adhere to President Obama's charge that *we* are the change we were looking for.

How I came to this possibly self-evident realization involved spending a lot of time with my daughter, one of her friends, and one of my old, radical, leftist, wanna-be hippy liberal friends.

My daughter is my my grandmother's great-grandchild. She's headstrong, smart, and takes no shit. Her friend is young gay man who has suffered too much abuse. My friend is an older gay man who has fought his own battles and has come out radicalized. I'm just, as I said elsewhere, a dumb white guy from the South with a thick accent and bad teeth. I know *nothing* about adversity compared to these people.

We spent most of our time playing Wii, but in between cursing the Rainbow Road portion of the Mario race game and trying to figure out how to keep the cats off the pad while we tried to do the stillness test for Wii Fit, we talked a lot. While little of it was directed specifically at politics, almost all of it was in some sense political.

The four of us, separately, have done a great deal in the last year in an attempt to be the change we were looking for. I spent 16-20 hour days on occasion working on two separate campaigns, one successful (mayor of Houston), one not (lowering out-of-pocket costs for HCC students). My daughter has been a mover and shaker on the OU campus for issues like equal rights for homosexuals and working to subvert the effort to distribute copies of Darwin's Origin of Species pre-pended with a creationist garbage. Her friend has been there at her side in addition to focusing on his own specific causes, e.g. making sure "art" is still a part of the "liberal arts." My friend ... well, he's been unemployed since Fannie Mae laid off a sizable part of its workforce, and he's spent his time in DC being the radical's radical. He's disrupted teabagger events. He's spent days hanging out trying to talk to Congresspeople. He's hijacked local radio shows to express his views. He's ridden with his biker club in support of equal rights ... busy guy.

Here's the kicker. They all have differing viewpoints on where Obama is in the grand scheme of things, but when asked this question directly:

"What do you think of people who refer to Obama as a disappointment?"

They all said the following, separately ...

"They're idiots."

All of these people have criticisms of things that have been or have not been done by this administration. Not a one of them had a complaint that would allow them to call Obama himself a disappointment. My friend -- a man so radical he has forced me to reconsider my definition of "radical" -- even said those who are calling for an investigation of Rahm need some serious psychiatric counseling, or at the very least an education in what it takes to get *anything* done in Washington, with which he has more than a little familiarity.

I came away from all of this with a new perspective, which boils down to this.

Fuck 'em. DU is for Democrats. We have our disagreements, sure, but the utter insanity on full display with many of the loudest posters here now mean nothing. They haven't done a damn thing but complain. They didn't listen to Obama during his campaign, and they never thought they would actually have to work at it, unless they consider "work" sitting on their ass on a message forum whining about whatever some talking-head on their TeeVee told them to whine about.

So, screw it. I'm staying, and woe be to those morons who think I don't belong here at the *Democratic* Underground.

OnEdit: clarity
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JohnnyLib2 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 01:08 AM
Response to Original message
1. Go for it, RoyG. !

You have a way of cutting through a lot of b.s.

I hear some of the same crap from long time RW relatives and acquaintances; hearing it on DU is painful and more.

Happy New Year!
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SeattleGirl Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 01:14 AM
Response to Original message
2. Roy, thank you for this.
I especially like this part:

"Fuck 'em. DU is for Democrats. We have our disagreements, sure, but the utter insanity on full display with many of the loudest posters here now mean nothing. They haven't done a damn thing but complain. They didn't listen to Obama during his campaign, and they never thought they would actually have to work at it, unless they consider "work" sitting on their ass on a message forum whining about whatever some talking-head on their TeeVee told them to whine about."

My feelings too. So many of the complainers didn't seem to hear Obama say "Yes WE can." They thought their job was done when they cast their vote, or they assigned things to him that he never said or intended, or they just want to be shit-stirrers and nothing more. I have no use for them either.

If someone raises an issue or a point that is thought-provoking, even when it's critical of Obama or something he's done, fine. But if all they want to do is piss and moan and gripe, well, I've got better things to do.

I'm glad you're staying around.

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HughMoran Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 01:20 AM
Response to Original message
3. Hear! Hear!
Nice read - thanks for relaying the background behind your thinking - something I'm not terribly good at.

I agree wholeheartedly with the "Fuck 'em. DU is for Democrats" thinking. I was feeling a little bit tired over the holidays and wondered if it wasn't just better to let them blather on until they got bored. That didn't last long. Post demagogic or other fabricated bullshit (feelings/manipulative arguments masking as "facts"), expect to be challenged. I'm not going anywhere.
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Hekate Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 02:54 AM
Response to Original message
4. Welcome back from your vacation, RoyG. That's a great heartfelt post.
They ARE idiots.

Hekate
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FrenchieCat Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 03:09 AM
Response to Original message
5. I'm glad you took a vacation,
and I'm glad you're back!

HAPPY NEW YEAR! :hi:

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rebel with a cause Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 06:45 AM
Response to Original message
6. I envy your vacation.
I spent my time feeding my ignore list. Of course I don't work so I guess I don't deserve a vacation. ;)
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Cha Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 08:26 PM
Response to Original message
7. Thanks ROYGBIV.
I recognize some of my thoughts in your stream of conciousness.. especially your last paragraph.

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madamesilverspurs Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 08:58 PM
Response to Original message
8. Absofrigginglutely.
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JeffR Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 09:40 PM
Response to Original message
9. if only I could rec threads from this forum...
well said

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Irishonly Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 09:46 PM
Response to Original message
10. Happy New Year
I am a trusting sort. There's lots of things I don't understand or think I like right now but I am smart enough to know it's too easy to shoot off your mouth. I also don't like having egg on my face so I will jut wait to see what changes happen. The HCR the Senate passed isn't the final bill and I imagine the President or the PTB in the Congress haven't stopped working on it.

I hope everyone gets a lot happier in 2010. DU used to be my favorite place to come and read. Now it makes me sad most of the time.
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Fire1 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 10:10 PM
Response to Original message
11. You're a helluva long way from being "a dumb white guy."
Whatever you do or say to counter the twits you run into on this site, don't feed into their insanity. If you take the bait, you end up with the tombstone and we lose. Glad you had a good Christmas and here's wishing you and yours a marvelous new year.
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RoyGBiv Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 10:49 PM
Response to Reply #11
12. I'm being a bit ironic ...
Edited on Sat Jan-02-10 10:50 PM by RoyGBiv
... or making the attempt.

There's actually a story behind my referring to myself as a "dumb white guy" that involves the friend I mentioned in the OP. This may be in the area of too much information, but I'm telling the story anyway.

I do (or did) have a thick accent, and I do have bad teeth. (Both run in the family it seems.) I met the friend when we were fifteen. He was a new person at school, having moved to a small Oklahoma town from Arizona by way of Arkansas. (His dad moved around a lot due to the nature of his job, and where we lived happened to have an EPA research facility, where he worked.) He was very smart and very much not enthralled with "rednecks," the most telling trait of which was in his mind a very thick Okie or Arkie accent. We met in an AP English class our sophomore years, and as he told me later, he was stunned when I gave some presentation we'd been assigned having had no other interaction with me other than hearing me talk. It was basically a book report, but it had to be more analysis than summary, and we had to verbalize it for the class and take questions by both the students and teacher. We were graded both on our presentation and the questions we asked.

I did my presentation on _Light in August_. Faulkner is generally difficult anyway, and that book is particularly so. Now, I've always loved Faulkner and chose that book because I'd actually already read it and just had to read it again with an eye toward analysis. I noticed him staring at me the entire time I was speaking, and after I was done, he was the first to ask a question. And, he asked some very good questions. He later said something like, "How anyone with that accent could speak that intelligently is a mystery to me. I have no idea if what you said was right, but it sounded good." "Well, I'm not your average dumb white guy," I answered, "and what I said was perfect."

I pull it out and use it for a couple reasons, one of which is direct irony. The first is when people say or imply I'm stupid for thinking what I think, which some very noisy voices on DU have been doing quite frequently lately. Also, it becomes a sort of genuine self-deprecation metaphor underneath the irony. We're all ignorant in our own ways. As a white, heterosexual male, I do not know nor can I ever truly know the struggles some people face for the reasons they face them. I was picked on and beaten up for being smart, having glasses, etc. when I was a kid, yes. I was never stripped naked and left laying in the middle of a schoolyard for being "sissy" however. I've never been a woman. I've never been a racial minority. And I won't pretend I understand the things people in these groups face personally, but I do "know a few things" because I listen, I watch, I learn, and I make an effort to understand to the best of my ability.

I parenthetically mentioned I "did" have a thick accent. I started to learn that the accent was something a number of people used to prejudge me. I worked on changing it. It still comes out when I'm tired, extremely relaxed and around people I know well, or intoxicated, but I mostly have a bland, non-committal accent with a hint of Southernness in it now. This lends more evidence to the point. Where I faced prejudice, I could change it. Most people can't.

I do still have bad teeth, though, which carries a strange stigma. I've not smiled in public in years, having trained myself not to do so. No one sees my bad teeth, but they tend to think I'm an angry, conceited jerk before they speak to me. I could change this also. I just don't have the money required.

As for your actual point, I try very hard not to feed their insanity. I fail sometimes. On occasion I simply can't resist playing with certain "intellects" the way a cat plays with a bug. I attempt to keep that to a minimum, though.
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Fire1 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jan-02-10 11:12 PM
Response to Reply #12
13. I suspected as much. Your written expression
is a dead give away. As for "playing with certain intellects," it can be tempting and we all fall prey at some time or another but be careful.
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