Election 2004 - What will become of the Left?

Democracy has turned towards the Right...the right Right, the Right way, the moral way, the safe way, the secure way, the entitled way. And what will become of the Left, the 48% left that has repeatedly been attacked and polarized by its President, Vice President, and representative officials during this election? If more than half the country is Right, then the remainder, the Left, must be wrong. Talk of "Healing the Divided Nation" swirling around the mass media, injecting a misleading rhetorical hyped hope in through the airwaves and between commercial breaks...but this isn't about healing...this is not about mending our differences, and anyone who thinks it ever has been is on Karl Rove's payroll. These crucial post-election politics at play are severely divided, on opposite sides of the coin, not even in the same spectrum. They can't be reconciled...except through a communication strategy as subtle and effective as fear-generation: denial. Much like Rodney King's intensely ridiculed racial warfare solution, just getting along is not an option for the losing side of the American political divide. We feel the Right is not what's right for the country. We feel that democracy failed us. The last thing we want is reconciliation. The last thing we want is to simply accept defeat and give up the fight to oust the most detrimental, irresponsible, damaging Presidential Administration that has ever "served" this country (and "served" is protected by quotation marks because the only interests the Bush Administration has served are its own and those of its corporate benefactors).

Never mind what this incumbent cancer of a commander-in-chief has done-his agenda for the next four years is a lot like his rendition of "My Pet Goat," where the American people, both Left and Right, are his collective Goat. We are simply a chapter in his book, a pawn in his disorderly chess match, a way for him to get right with God, a sound financial investment. Morals are his tools...his people use them well, pushing the buttons that open the right eyes--those of the uninformed and over privileged--and cause the left eyes to roll over in disgust and widen in frustration...those who are left, those of us who can see blatant misleading and injustice. We're onto him, but he shouldn't be our enemy, rather, he's our President, our representative to the world, and the whole basis of democracy is that we're his bosses. What makes the next four Bush years so difficult to accept is that we thought we could fire him. We thought could get him out. We underestimated the power of his brainwashing propaganda machine and political connections. We were overconfident, optimistic, as we right well should have been. Who would have believed could actually pull it off.... especially with so much evidence stacked against him in his first term. And as he bumbled through the debates, we stared at the TV in wonder, unable to comprehend how such an incompetent, incoherent man had weaseled his way into such a competition four years ago, let alone how he was currently employed as the leader of the supposed Free World...let alone a man very likely to be handed a 4-year contract renewal.

So let the hit parade begin. The corporate eradication of the environment, the disenfranchised economic disparity growing with each tax cut. Appoint an all GOP-sympathetic Supreme Court. Criminalize abortion. Let Enron off the hook and overhaul Social Security. Privatize health care. Alienate foreign allies. NATO, the United Nations no match for unilateralism. Reinstate the draft. Invade a couple more countries under false pretenses and plentiful oil. I'll go. I'll fight for your sick and twisted vision of democracy and freedom, as long as H.W. Bush and Cheney make some bank. I'll force everyone to do it my way. Straighten the gays. Christian the Muslims. Right the left. Turn the blue red. Turn the donkeys into elephants. You'll see. Those abortion clinics, turn them into multi-million dollar Halliburton-sponsored fear implantation clinics that breed paranoia, mindless obedience, and blind faith in our current corporate government powers that be, infiltrating the problematic 48% of American brains, the brains that voted to change the guard, that wanted to cast away the corrupt regime and banish it to Crawford, Texas, never to be heard from again except as the object of ridicule...forever immortalized as the President who sat reading a children's book while his nation was under attack. We wanted him out, the Left...but how dare we fall out of line? How dare we revolt against the Constitution? How dare we question and challenge our leader...and fall out of grace with patriotism. Just like the insurgents, collectively uprising, concentrating in the cities, where the freedom of speech is not artificial, sterilized, spoon-fed, and taken for granted...instead, it's freely generated, expressed, passionate and exploding, reverberating with purpose, a purpose we may never understand until it's too late, when the left is just a turn that's more difficult to make on a busy intersection than a right. When America turns right, the Left might be left behind.