He’s right, we all feel defeated, and I would add hopeless, from time to time. Thankfully, though I have expressed those very sentiments here more than once, I’m just too damn combative by nature to give up. I love my country, despite the amount of respect I’ve lost for it.
I think there’s a very good chance the rest of MY life will be a drag as a result of Bush the Lesser, but that doesn’t mean I have stopped caring about my legions of nephews, nieces, children of loved ones, of which there are many, parents, and other old people.
Atrios is talking specifically about doomsday bloggers, but when he did, I thought of all my friends and family, very smart and generally engaged above average politics-wise, and it is constantly depressing to me that I have to argue with their overwhelming sense of powerlessness all the time. It isn’t their fault, not completely; the system is fabulously rigged (Warning: Long and mostly boring though nonetheless right-on.) against them, and I don’t actually blame them for having the feelings of despair and powerlessness. It’s just the way it is.
But I get mad about them not voicing their opinions and sending money from their own asses, which is awfully easy to do these days.
Don’t ever let anyone tell you it isn’t tough being a news-junkie, political activist, or patriot. Because it is. I don’t hold any animosity towards intellectually consistent Republican partisans, despite how few of them there are left, because to me, indifference truly is the opposite of hate, or love. In the latter respect, it’s downright anti-Jesus. In the former, it’s pro-Satan, to put it in religious terms.
In secular terms, democracy doesn’t operate well without an informed, interested electorate. Somebody famous unlike me said that once, and they have cred.
