The Conservative Zone

This is great! I think I've finally found a conservative I can talk to human-to-human instead of enemy to enemy!

First, I want to lay out the way I see this: we're two intelligent thoughtful mostly good-hearted human beings who love their country. But we see the world around us in two completely different ways. We both have deeply held values that the other doesn't share, and we're both appalled at the other for not caring about our values. Can we agree on those points?

You might have a problem believing that I love our country because the left is always accused of hating America (even though that's not true, it's a nice demonization tool) So let me tell you how I feel about America.

America was one of the best things to come out of the Enlightenment. The concept that people should rule themselves was a radical concept, and I thank God the Founding Fathers were able to pull it off. (My fave FF btw is Jefferson OF COURSE!)

The US has simultaneously been the greatest force of good AND evil on the planet ever since. Over the last 100 years we've bombed and bombed and killed and killed and overthrown democratically elected governments and replaced them with tyrants and turned countries into hell for the people who live there, and always for profit. That is the worst thing America has done.

But it's also given birth to rock and roll, the Simpsons, some of the most advanced technologies, great philosophers and scholars, amazing workers' and civil rights movements, and some of the best entertainment on the planet. Americans are on the whole a good and decent people. And we walked on the moon for chrissakes!! That's got to be man's #1 achievement ever, in my opinion.

My son had the honor of being chosen one of two boys from his state to go to Boy's Nation in Washington last month, and one of the things they did was visit the white house and see King George. I'm proud he got to meet the president, but why the worst one in history? Oh, well. Anyway, this picture was on their website; it's my son in the White House looking up at the portrait of Lincoln. THAT makes me proud of my son and proud to be America. Lincoln symbolizes how our country, infected to the core with the perceived necessity of slavery, was able to evolve beyond that. That gives me hope for the future, that we'll be able to evolve beyond this neo-liberal horribly destructive form of capitalism that's ravaging mankind and the planet.

I don't however get misty-eyed when I hear the Star Spangled Banner. I wish our national anthem wasn't about bombs. I don't have that almost religious-like feeling about America that a lot of conservatives have.

There's a song called "Democracy" by Leonard Cohen that does make me get misty eyed and feel that religious-like feeling of hope:

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

I get choked up just reading it!

Commenting on your comments to me, it's clear we get our news from completely different sources. There's one thing I have to comment on though:

>>>I have a question, if Gore had won in 2000, and 9/11 happened, and Gore did the same exact things that Bush has done, would you be saying the same words now? I don't think so. I would, but you probably wouldn't. You'd be agreeing with Gore and his reasons.

Oh no I wouldn't. I HATED Bill Clinton. He came off as this caring liberal, and a lot of people bought that, but I didn't. It was during Clinton's time when all those mass layoffs happened. The divide between rich and poor grew, and he cavorted with dictators like Suhatro of Indonesia. He sold off all our airwaves with his Telecommunications Bill and laid the groundwork for the now complete corporate consolidation of media that's going on, so all our reality is dictated to us from the boardrooms now. He bombed an aspirin factory in Afghanistan. He oversaw the sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children that Madeline Albright said was "worth it." At the 2000 election, I thought it was a choice between two whores and I didn't think it mattered a damn which won. I had no idea the force for evil George Bush would become.

To to sum up, I hate George Bush, not America. They are not the same thing.

I guess I've babbled enough... I hope you write again!

Bonnie

Even though I've already written too much, I do want to respond to your responses!

>>What I mean by getting rid of terrorists is to create conditions that preclude the formation of terrorists,

Bin Laden said 9/11 was because we have US troops in Saudi Arabia. The only way we're going to stop suicide bombers is to get out of the middle east. Then the suicide bombings, I believe, would end instantly. But of course we can't do that because we need their oil. Domination and profit over human life, as always.

>>You think 9/11 was a BFD, but they started it, and we are going to finish it, because nobody of any sense of decency wants anybody to go through that again.

That made my head spin. Who is "they?" Iraq didn't start it. This makes lefties like me think you don't care which ragheads we're killing as long as we're killing ragheads in revenge for 9/11. And what do you mean, "we're going to finish it?" How are we going to do that when everything we're doing is only escalating it?

>>I'm sorry we have to kill anybody, but there are times it must be done.

Would you say that if it were 1,000 Americans a week that were getting car bombed instead of Iraqis?

>>I do not have a bloodlust, but I will protect myself, proactively if need be.

Okay, this whole "kill them before they kill me" thing I find horrifying. If you found out the neighbor down the street who doesn't like you bought a gun, would it be okay for you to go into his house and kill him because he might kill you?

>>>We are killing terrorists.

The cluster bombs we drop are killing children long after they're dropped. Think about applying this to America; we find out that and Eco Terrorist cell is living in a small town in Kansas, but we don't know where they are, so we just bomb the whole town. That is EXACTLY what we're doing in Iraq, because conservatives don't see the Iraqis as truly human.

>>The terrorists are killing the people of Iraq with their car bombs.

Yes, they are, and I think the Iraqis who kill other Iraqis are despicable.

>>So every time a terrorist kills a civilian, you blame it on Bush?

Yes. There wouldn't be car bombs if we weren't occupying Iraq.

>> The terrorists are purposefully trying to destabilize the Iraqi democratic process, which the Iraqi people want.

From what I understand, most people just want a stable government in and the Americans out.

>>The reason why there is no electricity is because the infrastructure is in tatters. Tatters from years of no maintenance, when Saddam was building palaces instead of taking care of his people.

From all I've read, Americans bombed the infrastructure, water treatment plants, electric plants, etc., in the first Gulf War, and the Iraqis couldn't get it repaired because of the sanctions. I saw (on tv) an Iraqi in Iraq saying the trash was building up because the trash trucks broke and they couldn't get replacement parts because of the sanctions. I think there is a definite whitewash of all the harm done by the first gulf war and sanctions by the claim that all the money went to building palaces for Saddam.

>>If I was a Canadian who slipped into the US to kill American civilians, then yes I would be a terrorist.

No, but you wouldn't be if you were an American in America fighting an invading Chinese Army. That's my point.

>>You seem to have this picture of a terrorist as a noble, self-sacrificing Iraqi who is against the US.

Well, he is self-sacrificing and he is against the US, but I don't know how noble he is. Certainly not if he kills other Iraqis.

>> Most (if not all) of the terrorists are coming in from places like Iran and Syria.

That's not what I've seen soldiers say. They say hardly any of them are outsiders, that most of them are Iraqis. So there we go, getting different info that gives us two different viewpoints on this.

>>They are intent on making Iraq an Islamic Theocracy rather than a secular democracy.

Yeah, that would be bad. I'd really hate to see that happen. I've read before the first Gulf War Iraqis had the highest standard of living in the Arab World. The women had rights. I'd hate to see them lose those.

>>You truly do not know your history. A group of SS, known as the Werewolves, performed terrorist attacks against German civilians and US forces as late as 1952. That's 7 years if you don't have enough fingers to count that high.

Really? No, I don't know my history. I didn't know that. I'll shut up about the WW2 comparisons now.

>>And if "they" are so powerful with their sneaking terror attacks, why has there not been another attack in America?

I don't know... maybe they've been foiled by local or federal law enforcement. That's the only thing that's ever going to stop a terrorist attack.

>I am convinced that we will have another attack on US soil, and this time it will be nuclear, but I hope we can do everything possible to prevent it.

That scares me to death. That's why it makes me so mad that Bush has made us so much more hated, and therefore so much more at risk.

>>>Okay, I'll give you a choice. You can live as an independent female, able to vote and hold a job, or you can climb into a burka and walk three steps behind your husband or brother, unable to read, hold a job or vote. Sure, why can't we have that?

Of course that's insane, but you're missing my point. Never in a million years would we allow ourselves to be turned into an Islamic fascist theocracy. But to them, looking through their eyes, never in a million years will they let their society be ruined by the US with all its decadency.

>>I must at least partially concede this point because I don't know the reasoning behind the actions, but I can not believe that Haliburton or any other company did it out of war profits or anything like that.

Do you know what the entire point of a corporations existance is? To make profit. It is extremely naive of you to think corporations don't happily take all the war profits they can get. Have you seen all the stuff Halliburton's been convicted of? So much corruption, yet they continue to get billion $$ no bid contracts and as far as I know Cheney (the evil troll under the bridge) gets a million a year from them. How can you not see how unbelievably corrupt this administration is? How there is no more line between government and corporation? BushCo doesn't work for the oil industry, they ARE the oil industry. That you think they have good hearts and are doing what they're doing for noble purposes just shatters my brain.

Sorry about the Shock and Awe comment, but there is a perception by those of us on the left that conservatives really get off on big things that go BOOM. How CNN has those graphics of all the helicopters and bombs and gives specs about them, all that just makes me want to heave chunks. These things are KILLING PEOPLE, which no one seems to care about. I ever saw this one soldier say, "I like to see the explosion of the bomb" ... like there's no mind paid to the people who are being torn apart under that bomb. When we looked at 9/11 we saw people. When we look at Shock and Awe we see a cool fireworks show. That's evidence of racism, of seeing the enemy and their children as less than human. That makes us lefties sad.

Okay, I'm really done now!

Bonnie