Contributed by: filbert Thursday, August 13 2009 @ 12:43 PM CST
A comment on a thread at Classical Values[*1] :
Personally, I think it’s as simple as “Fear of the Other.” Everybody has it, even sophisticated, literate leftists. And it manifests itself in this kind of utter, blind, unthinking irrationality, and an overwhelming desire to control those who are in any way different from you–different in thought, different in speech, different in behavior.
We see in the actions of the left today (and yes, of the right too) the increasingly vocal and energetic rejection of any action, concept, or person who lies outside everybody’s personal comfort zone. Civil discourse is impossible when you believe The Other is totally incapable of understanding your point of view. The Left has been there for a while. The Right is now catching up.
One can hope that we are not becoming completely impervious to reason and understanding, because the alternative is open violence and civil war.
And that would be a bad thing indeed. But not as bad as living in fear under tyranny. That’s what the Declaration of Independence was all about, after all. (See, this is one of the things that the Left does not understand about the Right–“it is better to die on your feet, than to live on your knees.” That’s why trying to ram this health care thing through is really, really, really playing with fire.)
I went round and round this week on my blog on Open Salon (yeah, some – no scratch that – many of them are rabid lefties)but many of them are otherwise sensible and reasonable people who like my writing and all that. I was trying to make the point that as an SA Tea Party committee member I could personally attest that no one was funding us, that we had raised all our operating funds from small donations, that we were all volunteers – and that we found out about a lot of town-hall events directly from our politician’s websites and from a Moveon.org mailing list that one of us joined – and all I got out of it was being called a liar or clueless – and a racist. They are sunk so far in denial about their teleprompter-genius that I don’t know what it would take to bring them out.