6/06/2005 08:39:00 PM|||kim|||
[ed: sometimes there's something that you want to say, but you can't get all the words out. That's where I'm at.]
When I was in college I was in a small fraternity at Cornell. Remarkably, there are principles that we lived by in those halcyon days gone by that are still part of how I practise this thing called liberalism. To whit, our fraternity creed:
To strengthen the ties of friendship one with another; to
prepare ourselves as educated men [ed: also women, cats, and alternative hippopotami] to take a more active
part and have greater influence in the affairs of the
community in which we may reside; above all to seek
the Truth, and knowing it, to give Light to those with
whom we may be associated as we travel along life's
pathway.
I thought of this today when I heard that irksome old saw about liberals hating America. For me, the acid test of your love for America is how you show your love for where you live.
Occasionally, I get the treat of flying from coast to coast during daylight hours. In those moments you can grasp the idea of loving America. You see the hububb over Los Angeles, the grandeur of the Rockies, the desert, the plains, expanses of forest, and the final descent along the coast of Boston, or more recently for me, the dramatic drop as you glide along the Potomac.
That's a rare pleasure, though, and more often our experience of America is the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the place we call our bed.
For the record, I've never met a liberal who hated America. By that, I mean the principles of the country. The values of freedom of thought, orientation, and religion.
If liberals hate anything, it's the active work of principals in the current government to undermine those principles. What bothers me is that those who are currently running this experiment we call a democratic republic, want to make it more of an enterprise run by a handfull of special interests. And from what I've seen, those interests do not have the welfare of the majority in mind, and don't care about the progress of the country, and may even be antithetical to it.
My starting point was one of focusing on the community. I mean your community. Where you live. This may be a time where the federal government will use our tax dollars on what benefits the corporate state. Instead, you and I have got to figure out how to make our community the best possible.
I look through my blogroll, and I see that this may be the unifying factor in why I look at these sites everyday. I believe you have the same vision. There's nothing wrong in preaching to the choir, if it happens to be a really good choir.|||111811063261729636|||Rough Draft of a Rant Save Template Changes.