Dean Christakos« Washington, DC Code Translated into Laymen's Speak | Main | Today in Interesting Numbers »
June 2, 2007
When Bloggers Pass Away
The blogger Steve Gilliard of The News Blog passed away today. Weblogs are a new enough medium that we're not used to their proprietors dying. They skew young. Steve was 41. He'd had various health problems he never really discussed, then went in for a heart valve operation, and over the next few months had a series of cascading organ failures and infections that he just wasn't able to recover from.
He wasn't the best blogger. Most of his online experience was formed early on, and he was wedded to the "Listserv" (mailing list) format, in which people would forward on articles they saw, so the majority of his blog posts were just links to articles, followed by a reprint of the entire article itself as the blog entry. I don't think he ever really managed to exploit the medium as well as many others have. On a bunch of issues, from education to labor to housing to entrepeneurship, he reflected the sort of narrow-minded provincialism that only someone born and raised and living in New York City could have. For a relatively young technophile, he had a disdain for the personal eccentricities of others rarely seen outside of assistant directors of human resources in suburban office parks and conservative commentator David Frum. Plus, he hated the Yankees, which is inexcusable for anyone living outside of the greater Boston area.
Yet I kept him on my "to read" list almost daily. He always found good articles. His opinions were forthright and reasoned and, most importantly, well-informed. He wasn't shy about mixing it up in the comments, and when he did do his own original writing, it was a thing of beauty. In Steve's memory, I'm going to do what he did-- link to one of his posts and excerpt it in its entirety, entitled I'm A Fighting Liberal.
This isn't my favorite. My favorite is a post he wrote in the early aftermath of Hurricane Katrina entitled We Told You So. It's almost prescient, given the outcome of the 2006 elections and seeing the current crop of Republican presidential candidates running away from Bush as fast as they possibly can.
Anyway, though, I'm a Fighting Liberal:
I'm a fighting liberalYou know, I've studied history, I've read about America and you know something, if it weren't for liberals, we'd be living in a dark, evil country, far worse than anything Bush could conjure up. A world where children were told to piss on the side of the road because they weren't fit to pee in a white outhouse, where women had to get back alley abortions and where rape was a joke, unless the alleged criminal was black, whereupon he was hung from a tree and castrated.
What has conservatism given America? A stable social order? A peaceful homelife? Respect for law and order? No. Hell, no. It hasn't given us anything we didn't have and it wants to take away our freedoms.
The Founding Fathers, as flawed as they were, slaveowners and pornographers, smugglers and terrorists, understood one thing, a man's path to God needed no help from the state. Is the religion of these conservatives so fragile that they need the state to prop it up, to tell us how to pray and think? Is that what they stand for? Is that their America?
Conservatism plays on fear and thrives on lies and dishonesty. I grew up with honest, decent conservatives and those people have been replaced by the party of greed. It is one thing to want less government interference and smaller, fiscally responsible government. It is another thing entirely to be a corporate whore, selling out to the highest bidder because the CEO fattens your campaign chest. They are building an America which cannot be sustained. One based on the benefit of the few at the cost of the many. The indifferent boss who hires too few people and works them to death or until they break down sick. Cheap labor capitalism has replaced common sense. "Globalism" which is really guise for exploitation, replaced fair trade, which is nothing like fair for the trapped semi-slaves of the maquliadoras. In the Texas border towns, hundreds of these women have been used as sex slaves and then apparently killed,the FBI powerless to do anything as the criminals sit in Mexico untouched by law.
For the better part of a decade, the conservatives made liberal a dirty word. Well, it isn't. It represents the best and most noble nature of what America stands for: equitable government services, old age pensions, health care, education, fair trials and humane imprisonment. It is the heart and soul of what made American different and better than other countries. Not only an escape from oppression, but the opportunity to thrive in land free of tradition and the repression that can bring. We offered a democracy which didn't enshrine the rich and made them feel they had an obligation to their workers.
Bush and the people around him disdain that. They think, by accident of birth and circumstance, they were meant to rule the world and those who did not agree would suffer.
Liberal does not and has not meant weak until the conservatives said it did. Was Martin Luther King weak? Bobby Kennedy? Gene McCarthy? It was the liberals who remade this country and ended legal segregation and legal sexism. Not the conservatives, who wanted to hold on to the old ways.
It's time to regain the sprit of FDR and Truman and the people around them. People who believed in the public good over private gain. It is time to stop apologizing for being a liberal and be proud to fight for your beliefs. No more shying away or being defined by other people. Liberals believe in a strong defense and punishment for crime. But not preemption and pointless jail sentences. We believe no American should be turned away from a hospital because they are too poor or lack a proper legal defense. We believe that people should make enough from one job to live on, to spend time on raising their family. We believe that individuals and not the state should dictate who gets married and why. The best way to defend marriage is to expand, not restrict it.
It was the liberals who opposed the Nazis while the conservatives were plotting to get their brown shirts or fund Hitler. It was the liberals who warned about Spain and fought there, who joined the RAF to fight the Germans, who brought democracy to Germany and Japan. Let us not forget it was the conservatives who opposed defending America until the Germans sank our ships. They would have done nothing as Britain came under Nazi control. It was they who supported Joe McCarthy and his baseless, drink fueled claims.
Without liberals, there would be no modern America, just a Nazi sattlelite state. Liberals weak on defense? Liberals created America's defense. The conservatives only need vets at election time.
It is time to stop looking for an accomodation with the right. They want none for us. They want to win, at any price. So, you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?
Posted by Dean at June 2, 2007 9:38 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.christakos.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/375