Time to Get Hard

To my liberal friends, and I’m not even sure I’m a liberal or a progressive. You (we) are known for our soft hearts and soft heads, well, on this one we need to get hard. Our Republican friends have counted on us to be compromising, nice, forgiving, but no more, not on this one. Jesus was not nice, he was hard and tough and he demanded  love and justice from his followers. He said, “If you don’t serve the poor and  the helpless, you do not know me” (Matthew 25).

Despite a Democratic President and Senate, Republicans have gotten their way on nearly every issue of public policy:

-low taxes on the rich and on corporations, with skyrocketing social inequality;

-a bloated military industrial complex, despite Eisenhower’s warnings against this;

-a preemptive war policy that encourages and exercises forms of assassination overseas;

-a Supreme Court ruling, Citizen’s United that allows the rich to buy their politicians;

-the swamping of our streets with guns, despite massive public polling against it;

-the stalling of all sane immigration reform, creating a hopeless and helpless underclass;

-the destruction of unions, and the undercutting of working person’s wages;

-the slashing of school funding, and enslavement of our young people to debt;

-a gap between the rich and poor that has now reached the level of the Great Depression;

-the erosion of even the belief that climate change is happening;

-a permanent prison industrial complex, jailing one third of African American males;

-a war on drugs, that really is a war on the poor;

-an insurance system that leaves 50 million people high and dry, with medical bills as the highest cause of bankruptcy.

I could go on and on. They will stop at nothing and they depend on our softness and our apathy. Time to stand up folks. Nice, liberal, soft hearted types, time to stand up and get hard. Demand no more compromise with the Republican House of Representatives–a group that the arch conservative New York Republican congressmen called “terrorists.” No, not my language, one of their own said this about these folks. Time to get hard folks. Andrew Sullivan, a sane conservative, calls the Republican Party the Party of Nullification–this is a must read.

Some might say, “Well, aren’t you being too harsh.” I say no. I think that liberals, progressives, small c conservatives, people who love family, love America, who want freedom, who want to raise children that have a chance in life, people who stay with their families and support their kids, who want a fair society, a society that is equal and vital, that want a strong civic life, that believe in good stewardship of the creation, that stand for strong schools for all kids no matter their color or class, that want politicians that are not millionaires, that want a financial system that is not too big to fail, that want a government responsive to the majority, that want a society that reflects a modicum of justice toward minorities, that seek a governmental system that is not corrupted by money, that want to walk their cities and be in their schools without fear of being shot, that want a defensive military that sees no need to “go overseas in search of monsters,” that want political races not stuffed with money…. these kind of solid, small c folks, and liberal lovers of humanity, they want this madness to stop. It is time for the liberal, middle of the road, independent types to stand up to this madness, to get hard and say no, before it really is too late.

In the end, let’s be careful folks, democratic governance is not guaranteed. It could disappear. We should be afraid. The Republicans are depending on our kindness, softness and apathy. NO more. Say NO MORE.