I know most of us are trying to put the acerbic politics of the latest election behind us, but I feel like I need to throw one last bucket of gas on the slowly dying fire.
Last Friday the Lariat printed an opinion piece written by Leonard Pitts for the Miami Herald.
In this article he asserted, amongst other things, that the Republican party has “embraced the politics of pitchforks and bomb throwing” and that by electing Barack Obama into the white house for another four years, Americans somehow made a stand against extreme politics.
First off, this characterization of any resistance to the Obama administration as dangerous and extreme is not only a reducto ad absurdum way of dodging any attempts to hold this administration accountable, it’s an offensive, hateful and potentially damaging characterization at that.
Ironically, the pitchfork has traditionally been a symbol of agrarian peasants revolting against harsh feudal lords.
I would think the pitchfork would be a symbol that the Left would embrace as symbolic of the class warfare that they seem to encourage.
I suppose that the new feudal lords of the 21st century technocratic bureaucracy are not to be rebelled against, but I digress.
If conservative America is truly in a “pitchfork and bomb-throwing” mood, it is only because they have been pushed to the brink by a liberal political establishment that has become increasingly hard-line, and by a leftist culture of hate.
For the last few decades, conservative bashing has become the hip, edgy cultural norm, not to mention a multimillion-dollar industry.
Michael Moore, Jon Stewart, Seth MacFarlane and Bill Maher, I am looking straight at you.
It has become standard operating procedure for left-leaning action groups, ideologues, and public figures to eschew fair debate for shrill polemics and mindless tropes designed to belittle, ridicule, insult, and ultimately de-humanize their political opponents.
Instead of respecting the fact that conservative Americans are Americans too, and we have a right to live our lives by our culture and our faith, the Left seeks to deny us those very rights by demonizing us as “intolerant,” “ignorant,” “redneck,” “backwards,” “crazy,” “nut-jobs,” “racists,” “homophobes” and “fascists.”
I cannot help but wonder if this is how it started for the Kulaks and Ukrainians living under the Soviet tyranny that would ultimately kill millions of them.
I am not suggesting that Obama is going to start forcibly starving red states into submission, but the culture of hate that the Left has developed, whereby people with different opinions and world-views are deemed to be of questionable humanity, has been the harbinger of countless atrocities and genocides throughout history.
Conservatives shouldn’t have to “compromise” with people who see them as sub-human and seek to deny them the basic right to live by their world-view, culture and faith.
Until liberals can put aside their culture of hate, this country will not heal.
William C VanRonzelen IV
Master’s Candidate
Economics
Salem, Mo.
