Answer #159 - A letter from the cliff

Dear Sir,
In response to your admonition - I'm wearing nothing close to rose-colored glasses. Quite the antithesis. Left, Right, no difference... it's become nothing more than a sensationalist summer camp (ala Lord of the Flies), replete with media censoring, big money spin-doctoring, and bile spitting back and forth.  We entertain ourselves, I think with this nice diversion while the new corporate Gods eat us whole.  Sadly, I've got no fight left in me for this, nor rose-colored glasses.  Maybe you'll get what you want, and the Right will get back in power, and then it'll all be... better?

But the fact is, a vote for Obama wasn't in all cases at all a vote against the man 'you folks' put in power.  A generation of children is looking at an impending implosion - and not much to hold onto.  While you argue the Constitution (and stubborn, hostile bombast doesn't mean you've won.. sometimes just means people get tired of beating their heads against a brick wall), they can see clearly that we're an organism on the brink.  Global warming or not.

He looked like hope - an intelligent leader, a constitutional scholar, a change. A chance. Maybe it's easier to see us as whiny elitists, maybe it's easier to see us children with our fingers in our ears singing, 'la la la la la la if I click my heels three times...'  Fact is, it's just not true of the majority.

There are crackpots on both sides. There are idiots on both sides. There are bloody battles being waged on-line and sensationalist bastards selling books on both sides.  Ignorance breeds evil.  It's pervasive on both sides - ignorance. Ignorance breeds civil war. Could be the death of us if we're not careful.. propagating like mold. You indignantly see us as hapless hippies hastening the end of freedom (the government should be the father-figure none of us got), we indignantly see you as the small-minded redneck proponents of the annihilation of civil rights (as long as it's wearing red, white and blue and has hands folded in prayer, it must be true)  And fact is, feeding the beast of righteous-indignation is nothing more than that. But 110 days from now, be careful what you wish for. If I thought for 5 seconds that, in the hands of the Right we'd suddenly be the dream land you'd like us to think Obama has single-handedly obliterated, I'd vote along with you.  And I'd buy all the bridges in Brooklyn...and swim in tea...or oil, as the case may be..

But I've come to believe, lately, that the only real hope there is lies somehow in the realm of love - and respect in all things. So I read between the angry lines - and think on what you write.  Because the truth, as always, lies somewhere in the Middle. And maybe we'll survive ourselves long enough to find a way out of the quagmire without rose-colored glasses.   I want America to be the dream it once dreamed it was - and not built on the blood and bones of smaller, less funded nations. I want something to believe in that's based in intelligent choice and decency - not just the cloak of it or the pretty, winking picture of it. But more than all of that, I want to survive this time, as we stand on either side of a cliff's edge, Lemmings deciding whether or not to jump into the sluttish and rutted sea.  
Will we jump?

Nothing good will come of the hostility and insult. Nothing. Only more of the same. The only real hope there is lies somewhere in the realm of love - and respect in all things.

Which is all I offer you this morning.
Krista