Reply #21: I'd like to say I'm pissed off at you for stating this...

[ElboRuum]

...but I'm not... so I won't.

What you have to understand, that might offer up some perspective, is that it took nearly 30 years of cultivating policies and propagandizing attitudes to devalue Americans as a whole, reduce their rights, and make moot their political power by right-wing authoritarians aided by a coterie of disenfranchised authoritarian wanna-bes, just to get to this point in time.

It will take at least that long to return to anywhere near the sort of political environment that existed before Ronald Reagan, and even then, we will all have the ability to look back and be sorrowed by the loss of progress those 30 years could have represented.

The American people, as much as those with vision and purpose and the will to act upon it may be chagrined by the fact, are inertial both in their thinking and their feeling. They don't like to be jolted to and fro from one sociological reality to another. Why do you think that only the most rabidly radical conservative fringe elements in our country still view Bush with any real respect? His administration pretty much took a country that was progressing forward at a pretty decent pace and threw it into reverse suddenly, demolishing the transmission in the process, souring the populace with a major shift in sociological reality. Now, we've gone backwards at a breakneck pace, and slamming the transmission back into forward again without slowing the country down a bit first isn't the answer.

The candidates we have are, truly, not as liberal as we'd like, granted. They're not anywhere as progressive as we'd like. Also, granted. But maybe they are only a short-term interim part of a movement that's far more vast. Increasingly progressive their successors will most likely be (why am I talking like Yoda?). If we can just get this country lurching in the right direction after four years, and moving at school zone speeds by the end of eight, I could be very pleased with that result.

Who knows, maybe when I'm 70, roughly 30 years from now, I'll be able to see similarity with the country I knew when I was 7.