[lbo-talk] mourn

Seth Ackerman sethia at speakeasy.net
Thu Nov 4 16:03:52 PST 2004


From: "Liza Featherstone" <lfeather at panix.com>


> Katha Pollitt's column is an excellent counter to all the stupid
repetitions
> I've seen of that stupid cliche, "Don't Mourn, Organize."
>
> http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041122&s=pollitt

Frankly, I find this column idiotic. This is the same country that elected LBJ and FDR in landslides. So this year because 55% of people turned out and 51% of those voted for a folksy cretin whose policies most of them are ignorant of, we're supposed to just chuck in the towel? I know it gets monotonous to keep repeating facts we all already know, but for the past 30 years this country has been subject to a well-funded, well-organized, massive propaganda campaign from the right that has gone mostly unchallenged. There is a determined minority of fundamentalists with hateful politics, but they're a minority of the public and a minority of Bush voters. Most Bush voters probably support civil unions for gays - how many Roosevelt Democrats in 1936 or Adlai Stevenson liberals in 1956 would have supported that? No, we're not in the middle of one of those rare periods in history when social attitudes suddenly take a giant leap forward, but I really don't think they're going backwards either.

Seth



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