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...this is not the real world. I mean, it is representative of a certain part of the real world, but that part is overrepresented.
A lot of what goes on here just doesn't happen in most people's lives in any other context. The yelling and the profanity (I'm not prude and can cuss like a sailor myself, but not ALL THE TIME) and the chest-pounding rhetoric just doesn't work when you're faced with a real person in a real situation. I don't want to unnecessarily insult anyone by saying it -- because I realize times are genuinely hard for a lot of people -- but I am very often tempted to ask some who are currently employed how they manage to keep their jobs. Do you really go into that staff meeting with your opinion sitting on your shoulder like an Eveready battery? Do you really wander down to your kid's school every day and pull out your book of the world's most profane insults and give them what for? Do you really stand on the street corner jumping up and down like some wild, enraged beast with spittle showering passersby as you scream into their ear?
If so, what does that get you?
Besides being insensitive, I can't ask these questions because I wouldn't get an honest answer anyway, or I'd get an answer that attempted to deflect the question in an attempt to accuse me of being morally inferior for *not* doing these things.
The real world that consists of real people working very hard to get things done in the realm of politics just isn't like this. I've mentioned it before, but it's worth mentioning again.
I sat in a room full of flat out, card carrying, tree hugging liberals on the day Houston elected a gay woman as mayor. (And as an aside, while Annise Parker is certainly liberal in her political outlook, she is far more like Obama than Kucinich. She's a technocrat who understands what she faces and that she has been elected to serve all the people of Houston, which includes a helluva a lot of people whose livelihood depends on the oil business.) We were all jumping up and down and yelling and hollering and some of us crying, and when she got up to speak and confirm that, yes, Virginia, a gay woman *can* be elected to the fourth largest city in the American despite its being located in the Deep South, her first five minutes of talking were intended to calm us down and remind us that the work had only just begun. It's not a sporting event. The election is the easy part, so let's take all this energy and put it to good use. We milled around talking, still grinning from ear to ear, shaking hands, getting in line to shake her hand ... and not ONCE through the entire thing did I hear a single, hate-filled complaint about President Obama. We talked about concerns and hopes and struggles, but we didn't sit there and bitch incessantly.
My cynicism is directed less toward liberals or even people than it is toward the utility of open discussion forums to achieve positive results. Just look at what we have here: thousands upon thousands of seemingly committed progressive voices just itching to make this country better, to help rebuild it from 8 long years we all suffered through. But guess what? Even in the middle of that 8 long years when the administrators tried to do something positive by putting together an "DU Activist Corps" (it's still there in our profiles ... member, yes or no?), nothing really came of it. Oh, it's there, but what does it do? I gave up on it after the 50th iteration of an e-mail writing campaign was the only "good" idea everyone could agree to. The only "good" idea was one that didn't require anyone to get up off their ass and out of their air conditioned building.
I know there are good people here who work very, very hard, and I even know that some of those hard workers are people who positively hate me and pretty much everyone who hangs out in the BOG. But most of the people who scream and holler and are busy from sunup to sunup posting nothing but vile blathering do not work hard. They just complain, all the time, and they by collective action reduce the efficacy of this place and places like it that could be mustered for the hard work Obama clearly reminded us would be needed the day after the inauguration.
And I'm right there with ya. Sick of them, I am. Of them I am sick. Now pass the green eggs and ham.
I'm bastardizing Dr. Seuss now. I should be in bed ...
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