Or maybe spending more time around red staters, rather than making us more accepting and open and eager to outreach respectfully to average churchgoing working schmoes, it would make us more angry, disrespectful and disincined to dialogue and broad coalition building--- but just jealous of metro coastal lefties.
<br><br>I seem to have been inadvertently disproven. Check and mate.<br><br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><br><br>Jim Straub wrote:
<br><br>> are more than herds of bleating ignorant sheep). I think if most<br>> leftists had friends, co-workers, partners, co-congregants and fellow<br>> members of social circles and organizations whose political leanings
<br>> better reflected those of society at large, we as a movement would be<br>> better able to 'move' the public on more issues, and have a more<br>> realstic sense of what will happen and what can be changed and how. Not
<br>> that transformative, sustaining vision is unimportant, but rather, we<br>> can't there from here erecting a prefigurative myopiatopia around us.<br>><br>My reaction to religion and to people who live inside the Fox News
<br>bubble is based on interacting with these people on a daily basis. I<br>think that if I still lived in Arlington and rubbed shoulders daily with<br>activists, my comments about religion would be less hostile. But being
<br>back in Kansas City I've come to interact with people, especially family<br>members, who revolve their lives around religion and Rush.<br><br>I spent last weekend in the Bay Area. At some point on Friday afternoon,
<br>after walking around downtown S.F. for several hours, I got this feeling<br>of culture shock that was rather unsettling. For one thing, I'm not used<br>to seeing that many people outside, not in their cars, walking around. I
<br>probably saw more people walking around in one day in S.F. than I do in<br>a year in Kansas City. And it was also unsettling to be around so many<br>people who have similar politics.<br><br>Again, those of you who live in "liberal" places where you interact with
<br> like-minded people on a daily basis should count your blessings. I<br>guess the best thing about being surrounded by people who disagree with,<br>and hate, one's politics is that it keeps you sharper and more<br>
appreciative of comrades. It's kind of hard to be sectarian in a city<br>with few leftists.<br><br></blockquote><div><br> </div><br></div><br>