THE CASE FOR LIBERALISM – PART I
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few is the death knell of Democracy. No republic in the history of human kind has survived this. The elections . . . will say something about what happens to ours and the omens are not good.
Liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, the freedom of belief, art, poetry, city life—the things that make America worth dying for.
The people who call themselves conservatives stand for tax cuts and more tax cuts, annual tax cuts—the only policy they know: cut taxes. Use the refund to buy a gun and an attack dog to take with you when you drive your all-terrain vehicle through the barricades of Republicanville to make a foray into enemy territory to purchase supplies.
They’re leading this great country toward a lost new world where Social Security and Medicare will be dim memories and America will be a series of malls connected by interstates and people will live in walled compounds with moats, like in the Middle Ages. . . .
The Union is what needs defending. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of—not even close!
This gang of Republicans has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the rest of us and clear-cut the forest and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them. Their crusade against government has given patriotism a bad name and their victory has been accompanied by such hubris as would choke a goat.
Medicare is the creation of Democrats and it has changed old age. If you’ve grown old, you’re not expected to accept pain and misery as your cross to bear and sit by the window and sink uncomplainingly into the dark. . . . Medicare says that even though you’re not working and you may need special help with the ordinary business of life, nonetheless you have value in this society. This is a Democratic idea. Go ahead and be a howling right-winger if it gives you pleasure, but nonetheless, milk comes from cows and Medicare comes from Democrats!
If lower taxes are your priority over human life, then we know what sort of person you are. The response to a cry for help says a lot about us as human beings. . . .
This is Democratic bedrock. We don’t let people lie in the ditch and drive past and pretend not to see them. . . . A liberal is a conservative who’s been through treatment. To the hard-ass red-neck Republican tax-cutter of the suburbs, human misery is all a fiction, something of novels, stories of match-stick people. He’s doing fine, so what’s the problem? He’s oblivious. George Custer knew more about the Sioux Indians than this guy knows about the world around him. He’s heavy into postponement for short-term savings and long-term disaster!
--Excerpted from Garrison Keillor