Steve GannTime for Change!
January 5th 2007 14:43
A Political Animal at Full Moon!
It is Past Time, Well Past time for a Change!
A politician begins to speak:
"Everybody knows American isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating, at the top of his lungs, that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free, then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest." Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then you can stand up and sing about the land of the free. I've known Bob Rumson for years. I've been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn't get it. Well, I was wrong.
Bob's problem isn't that he doesn't get it. Bob's problem is that he can't sell it. Nobody has ever won an election by talking about what I was just talking about. This is a country made up of people with hard jobs that they're terrified of losing. The roots of freedom are of little or no interest to them at the moment. We are a nation afraid to go out at night. We're a society that has assigned low priority to education and has looked the other way while our public schools have been decimated. We have serious problems to solve, and we need serious men to solve them. And whatever your particular problem is, friend, I promise you, Bob Rumson is not the least bit interested in solving it. He is interested in two things and two things only: Making you afraid of it and telling you who's to blame for it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is how you win elections. "
You may recognise the speech. It's from The American President by Arron Sorkin. The interesting thing is, that the Bob Rumson character could have been modelled after John Howard. Hell, he could be his twin!Howard last got elected by telling us lies -- telling us, we should be afraid of the future. Then he went on to tell us why. He sewed fear and promised us a way out. John Howard lied! He is not our savior!
John Howard's Chicken Little act has fallen on hard times. Global warming is a reality, not his reality -- our reality. Nuclear energy will not be the agency of our success. Nor will isolating Australia from initiatives such as Kyoto. John Howard is a smart politician, a canny politician -- but that doesn't make him right. It is time to turn the page and look to the future, not the past. It is time to vote for a viable alternative.
Vote Howard out? Hell yes.
Count me IN!
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