activism (Page 29)

Ever wondered who the “liberal elite” are that threaten to destroy, no, who are destroying the Constitution and taking away everyone’s civil liberties?
Here are a couple lists for you. They’re long, but not exhaustive.
Part I: The yes questions. If you answer yes or maybe or have to think about it for more than four seconds on any one question, you are part of the Liberal Elite.

  • Do you call the Tea Party movement “teabaggers?”
  • Do you make fun of fundamentalist Christians?
  • Are people who misspell signs at demonstrations fucking idiots?
  • Does human-produced pollution contribute seriously to global warming?
  • Is global warming an issue we should all be concerned with?
  • Is Sarah Palin not very bright?
  • Should the government be required to obtain warrants before wiretapping our citizens?
  • Is empathy a strength, or, at a minimum, is empathy a very important quality in the experience of being human?
  • When you hear “freedom” do you think freedom of speech, freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom to improve our lives, freedom from harm?
  • When you hear “patriot” do you flinch because you think of the Tea Party movement types but then, with some thought, do you realize that actually you do feel patriotic because you want the best for everyone in our country?
  • Do you see groups of impassioned Tea Party movement protesters and really, truly not get why they’re so upset? (And, do you then think they must just be idiots?)
  • When you pay your taxes do you maybe think, this totally sucks, but do you also have a sense if you really think about it that you are investing in the infrastructure of our nation, the commonwealth, so you feel a sense of pride and responsibility?
  • Do you wonder how anyone could watch FOX News and take it seriously?
  • Does everyone have a right to a high quality education in the USA? Should schools get the funding they need? Do you believe some students need more support to be successful in school than other students?
  • Do you believe it’s the responsibility of the government to protect us?
  • Does governmental protectionto you mean the government is responsible for:
    • building and maintaining our infrastructure
    • keeping our food/water/air/medicine safe
    • researching health, environmental, and other nationally important issues
    • ensuring big corporations don’t abuse their workers
    • maintaining a strong national guard, police, fire fighters
    • providing the resources necessary to predict and/or prevent and/or recover from natural disasters.
  • Do you believe that hiring private businesses to take over governmental functions in most cases actually takes taxpayer money and turns it into corporate profits?
  • Do you think that no-bid contracts given to private corporations to perform government functions costs the taxpayers a hell of a lot more money than it would cost to have the government do it? Might you refer to that as privateering?
  • Do you believe that private corporations in most cases hired by the government to take on governmental functions end up being governmental entities themselves but without any accountability to the public? Again, might you call that privateering?
  • Do you believe the government has a moral mission to provide for the general welfare, the common good of the people while corporations are only concerned with profit and are only accountable to their shareholders? And, again, might you call that privateering?
  • Do you believe it is literally dangerous in many cases to turn governmental functions over to private corporations? For example, asking medication companies to test their own medicines for safety since the FDA hasn’t been properly funded and can’t handle all the testing required? (Privateering.)
  • Does it scare the shit out of you that not only is Blackwater a private firm making millions of dollars in profits—taxpayer money—has a massive training facility in Southern California so they can take on border patrol work? Is the idea of a private corporation taking over so much of the work the military is trained to do absolutely abhorrent to you? Does it seem wrong that it’s Blackwater personnel guarding the sites where Blackwater crimes (murders) were likely committed so investigators are guarded by the same people they are investigating? (Privateering.)
  • Are protected lands such as National Parks an important part of our commonwealth?

Part II: The no’s. If you answer “no” to any of these, you are part of the Liberal Elite.

  • People who have a lot of power generally deserve that power. They must have worked hard to get there. If they inherited wealth and social capital that’s because their family worked hard to get there, so the power they get from their wealth is still merited.
  • Do you look to the person lowest on the totem pole (the “bad apple”) when something goes wrong to right those wrongs? (Think Abu Ghraib and who was punished there.)
  • When someone says, “I want the best for everyone in this country,” do you hear them saying, “I know what’s best for everyone in this country.”
  • Have the Liberal Elite have taken over Washington and are they trying to dictate how Americans spend their money because the Liberal Elite are so full of themselves they think regular Americans don’t know better?
  • Civil liberty means the freedom to do as I please.
  • Freedom of religion means the government should allow schools to force children to pray. Freedom of religion means that the Truth should be shared with as many people as possible because otherwise they’ll burn in Hell.
  • If someone is poor, they must not have worked hard enough.
  • If someone is addicted to drugs, they are immoral.
  • Corporations are in bed with Washington and there’s nothing we can do about it.
  • Corporations are in bed with Washington but the Corporations are less to blame for it since they’re just doing everything they can do make a profit which is an admirable goal.

Well, how did you do? Are you, like me, a member of the Liberal Elite?
Every single time you call the Tea Party movement people names, you are reinforcing the radical right’s frames. You are enforcing the myth that there is some Liberal Elite trying to crush regular Americans. We progressives need to step outside the frames of the radical right and start over.
The radical right/Tea Party movement uses facts, but they are driven by emotion, morality, values.
The progressives/liberals use facts, but we don’t even know what our own emotions, morality, or values are because the radical right has taken over so completely the framing of the issues. Until we, the progressives, know what our values are (you can see above some examples of what I believe they are) we will never make serious change.
Empathy and empowerment = strength and responsibility. That’s what we’re about. We are regular Americans. Empathy and empowerment equals strength and responsibility. Be proud of it.

Why my recent obsession with reframing the political debate? Free will is something I value more than almost anything. However, we can’t have free will if we don’t understand what our choices are. George Lakoff writes, “At stake here is the deepest form of freedom — the freedom that comes from knowing your own mind. If you are unaware of your own deep frames and metaphors, then you are unaware of the basis for your moral and political choices…”
As a far-left progressive, I’ve tended toward the idea that compromise is weak. We should stand up for our beliefs and not apologize—Americans deserve freedom from harm and, therefore, the government should provide high quality healthcare for all. Recognizing the need to reframe the debate ties into my no-compromise positions, but it allows for the more pragmatic among us new freedoms, too. The freedom to know our minds and make informed choices. Perhaps more importantly, this new information also helps me realize that real freedom is progressive (systemic, empathetic).
Understanding that someone next to me can hear the words freedom, liberty, opportunity, or harm and those words will have entirely different meanings than they do for me is essential. Even more urgent, though, is realizing how much the radical right over the course of my lifetime (in the last 30-40 years) has co-opted the language using uncontested notions of the words to change how even I hear the words. For example, when I hear “fairness,” now, I automatically think “but life isn’t fair, we can’t require or expect fairness.” That’s not what fairness used to mean to me.
Some highlights I’ve been returning to as I work to reframe ideas in my own mind:

  • There are no “self-made” men or women in America. We all depend on the commonwealth’s infrastructure.
  • Historically, American freedoms are progressive freedoms.
  • Our military is an occupying force in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • We need freedom from religion. No individual or institution has the right to force feed their religious views onto me or my children.
  • Guided by empathy, progressives are responsible for themselves and others recognizing the deep connections among individuals and systems.
  • Progressives support freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom from injury or abuse.
  • The uncontested metaphors for freedom are freedom of movement and freedom from restriction. Progressives know that if our neighbor’s freedoms are restricted, we all suffer.

Progressives need to take back the meanings of freedom, opportunity, and liberty. We can only do this not by screaming about the immorality of the radical right, but instead we need to reframe the debate. We mustn’t use their language in the discussions. Going on the defensive only reasserts the validity of their frames.
Freedom isn’t free. We invest in freedom with our tax money. We are blessed to live in a country where every person has a right to live a free life thanks to the commonwealth we all provide.
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Let’s say you believe life begins at conception. Personally, and by that I mean for me, I believe it does. We’ll start with that assumption. In fact, let’s just agree with the Republican Platform where they “affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed…and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” Additionally, all Republicans who receive support from the national party believe this. Let’s be Republicans for a moment here. Not right-wing-extremists. Just Republicans, moderates, left-leaning, even. But we are Republicans who are receiving support from the national party. So. Life begins at conception. Got it? Okay.
Here’s what I encourage you to consider.
The house is burning down. In the room most consumed by flames there is a three year old child, screaming, crying, pleading for your rescue. Next to the child is a petri dish containing live human cells about five days after fertilization, at the blastocyst stage. They are about to be transferred into the waiting mother that evening. You are only able to save one of these babies.
Which baby would you save?
Why?
How would you feel if you could only save the younger baby?
How would you feel if you could only save the older baby?
How are those feelings different?
Now, a second story for your consideration.
Again, a fire is consuming the building. In the room, engulfed in flames is a crying infant. A newborn, just hours old. Next to that baby is a woman, comatose or in a “vegetative” state. All medical personnel have agreed she will never wake up. She is, however, carrying a baby inside her. She has almost reached full term. Most reasonable people would describe her as having a baby inside of her. If it were born now, it would survive.
There is no time, though, to take time for considering your options. You will either save the crying newborn, or the effectively dead woman and her live baby.
Which baby would you save?
Why?
How would you feel if you could only save the younger baby?
How would you feel if you could only save the older baby?
How are those feelings different?
Probably, when faced with this sort of decision you feel even more serious discomfort. Perhaps you are the sort of person who simply can’t deal in hypothetical questions or think they are pointless. That’s fine. Don’t do it. If you are like me, the conflict is so great a choice seems impossible.
You see, as most of us recognize, abortion is complicated. And, you may see in that first example, there is a point where most reasonable people will put the life of the born child before the unborn child. The second example is more complicated, but, if you are anything like me, you might lean toward the born child. It’s even horrible and shameful just typing that.
If you vote for a Republican, though, no matter how moderate or centrist, if they have support from the national party, you are voting for someone who has said in writing they believe those cells in the petri dish have as much a right to life as that crying toddler. Either they believe this, or they lied to get the support of their party.
The Republican party is run by extremists who don’t speak for most Americans. We progressives have done a horrible job exposing their immoral behavior.
If you know someone who believes Republicans stand for family values, please ask them to talk with their representatives. Have they signed the Republican platform? Do they believe in what they signed? Or, were they lying so they could get the support of the party?
Cells in a petri dish = a toddler. Or, lying just to get elected.
Those are the choices for Republicans.

She was only ten when he started coming in to her room at night. “Just let me lie with you,” her Daddy said.
By the time she was sixteen they had sex once a week when her Mother was at the gym. Sometimes more often when her Mother was out of town.
The week before she went to college she found out she was pregnant. She had been with no other men. Only her Father.
The Republican platform would require this girl to carry that child to term. She would have no other legal or safe options.
Some of the Republicans who stray from their party’s official platform might require her to go ask her parents for permission to get an abortion. Imagine her asking her mother or father that question.
Abortion is complicated. No one thinks it is a simple issue. No one has clear answers. No honest person really believes it is ever easy.
Surely, though, we can all agree that this child abuser, this perpetrator of incest, this “Father,” shouldn’t have more rights than his daughter? Should she be forced to spend nine months carrying that baby?
The Republican platform says she must.
For those of you who so desperately cling to the idea that, “Oh, that’s just the freaks on the far right, *real* Republicans understand there are situations where a woman should have a right to an abortion,” consider this: Any Republican who wants to get financial support from the party must sign the platform. So, if they want to have the support of the Republican party they either they agree that abortion is always wrong, or they are liars.

Progressives have been a bunch of well-intentioned but misguided wuss-bags. Stuck in the Enlightenment version of how our minds work, we’ve missed the brain science boat conservatives jumped onto forty years ago.
Until I read George Lakoff’s The Political Mind and now as I’m finishing Drew Westen’s The Political Brain I was misguided, too. I thought it best to stay “above” the low-brow games the right wing played, appealing to people’s fears and encouraging misinformation. Turns out they’re just ahead of the game in understanding how our brains work.
Take Cathy*, the 24 year old administrative assistant in a small southern town. Avidly against abortion, a faithful church-goer, she’s just finished college and moved into her own place with a friend. The small two bedroom apartment is above a local dive bar, but the girls don’t mind. It’s exciting and makes it feel a bit like they’ve move to the big city without having to leave the comfort of home.
On her way home from work one evening, Cathy stops at the supermarket to get some eggs and cereal. As she leaves, crosses the street, and walks toward her new home, she doesn’t notice the man in the dark hooded sweatshirt following her. She gets to her door, opens it with her key (you can’t be too careful, even in small town America), and starts up the stairs. The stranger catches the door before it closes, slams Cathy onto the stairs, and rapes her. A month later, Cathy finds she is pregnant. She was going to wait until she was married before having sex. The rape has sent her into a tailspin over the last few weeks and now, finding she is pregnant, she feels lost. She considers killing herself, but knows that is a sin. Everyone she knows is against abortion. No one would understand. But even the thought of carrying this man’s baby makes her sick to her stomach. She cries herself to sleep for days.
The Republicans with their “abortion is always wrong” position believe Cathy must carry this child to term. They believe the rapist’s right to impregnate Cathy and control her life is more important than her right to end the pregnancy.
I tweeted about this today (supporting the Republican platform means you support rapists) and got a satisfactory response. I was called stupid, told I should think before I speak, and other pathetic attempts at insults. According to the Republican platform, a woman’s right to have an abortion is less important than a rapist’s right to force her to bear his child.
This is just one of many posts I expect I’ll be making about ditching old Enlightenment ideas of how our minds work (rational reasoning) in favor of the real processes with which we make decisions (emotions, metaphors, framing, neural networks). Progressives are going to keep losing, big time, and the Sarah Palins of the world are going to keep boggling our minds and blowing us out of the water if we don’t learn these lessons fast.
*The Cathy story is entirely fictional, but to be effective progressives need to tell stories illustrating their values and principles.