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Thoughts on the Disastrous Midterm Election
by The Angry Liberal
Boy, we Liberals really got our asses kicked last Tuesday, right? The bad old republicans drowned us in a flood of campaign money, and now we're lying on the bottom of the political ocean, our eyes staring blankly up at the surface, right? For those of us who feel badly about the outcome of this election and especially for those on the right who are enjoying our pain, you should know something. Liberals do feel pain right now. But it's not ours we feel. It's the pain of those we were trying to help on Tuesday.
Republicans used to parody Bill Clinton's famous quote: "I feel your pain." They made fun of it mostly because they're assholes, but partly because the lack of a similar capacity within themselves makes them uncomfortable. The ability to care about someone less fortunate than yourself is a patented Liberal character trait. When we work hard to elect Liberals to office (read: Democrats, but only because the Democratic party is a shade more liberal than the republicans), most of us aren't doing it for personal gain. We know that right now, there are senior citizens who are having to choose between buying their medication and decent food. We know that the 39 million Americans without health insurance are suffering needlessly. We know that mindless discrimination still touches the lives of a good number of those who aren't straight white protestant American males.
Now that Republicans completely dominate the country, we also know that pregnant teenage girls will begin dying as Roe vs. Wade is overturned. We know that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizens will be blown to bits by bombs paid for with our tax dollars. We know that thousands of Americans will be needlessly injured and killed as punitive damage caps allow corporations to simply include defective product deaths as part of the cost of doing business. We know that the working poor, the middle class, and our unborn children will be saddled with a larger share of the tax burden as republican tax policy shifts it away from the rich. We know that many American families will grieve the premature loss of their sons and daughters in Iraq. In short, you're damn right we Liberals are miserable right now.
The interesting is thing is that a great many, perhaps most real Liberals will be only marginally affected by this list of Republican-inflicted tragedies. A good many of us are financially comfortable. We may already have health insurance. We will get a check in the mail, albeit a small one, when the bad guys cut taxes for their rich friends. We may have decent or tolerable jobs. We may not have family members who will die in Iraq. Nonetheless, we feel miserable about Tuesday's loss, not for ourselves, but for poor, the elderly, the weak, and the disenfranchised that the Republicans will begin chopping up like cordwood in their quest to line their own pockets with America's treasure.
My advice to fellow Liberals: We must begin to treat our fight for the less fortunate much as a doctor treats a patient's disease. We must fight like hell on his or her behalf, but when we lose one on the table as we did Tuesday, we must not be incapacitated by it. We must and will live to fight another day.
To those who will suffer under the reign of the conservatives, we will continue to fight for you, but like that patient, you must meet us halfway. You must care enough about your own fate to organize and vote. Help us to help you. Most of all, it's for damn sure we all must do a better job than we did on Tuesday.
To those on the right who are enjoying watching Liberals suffer, know this: Real Liberals will never be personally hurt by the loss of an election. You didn't hurt us on Tuesday. You hurt America's less fortunate. My, aren't you powerful. It takes real courage to embark upon the course of self-fulfillment at the expense of the defenseless among your countrymen.
So have fun dismantling America's social progress, all of you conservatives out there. Work as hard as you can to earn yourselves a spot on the wrong side of Heaven's gates. But know this: The next time we Liberals beat you in a big election, the same empathetic qualities that torment us today will allow us to feel the joy of those upon whom you will wipe your feet for the next two years. And listening to you creeps whine about being forced to do the decent thing against your will should be pretty fun as well.
Hey, just because we Liberals can feel the pain of others doesn't mean, in the case of suffering conservatives, we can't enjoy it a little . . .
Write The Angry Liberal at: thebigcheese@theangryliberal.com
© 2002, The Angry Liberal
