11/9/10

EXIT POLLS – THROWN INTO REVERSE OR TIME FOR NEW AMERICA



EXIT POLLS – THROWN INTO REVERSE OR TIME FOR A NEW AMERICA
You have seen the election maps covered in blood red, haven’t you?


The Majority has spoken. They want to go back, way back. The good ole’ boys and girls of the American South and the Heartland –the Majority- have put their cars and trucks into reverse and rammed their feet on the gas. I wish I could say that they surprised me, but they didn’t. I’m sure most of you weren’t surprised either. Maybe you were a little disappointed, you know, because you couldn’t help but hope. Disappointed, but not surprised.

After all, you remember the American Majority, right? They’re the ones that elected George W. Bush twice; then got mad at him because he was George W. Bush and he did just what they should have expected him to do. Now, they’ve re-elected him and all his best and brightest ideas in new and different bodies with new and different names and faces. May God help us! Now they’ll all sit back and await a different result. Do you think they’ll get mad again when who they chose turns out to be just who they chose - again? It’s likely. The Majority always finds a landing pad for all their anger and it’s always on the head of someone or something other than themselves. They never blame themselves.

So I think it’s time that we blame them. Us, the Minority, who dwell on the coast of the East and the West and in the towns of New England and in the cities across America that dot the election map with a splatter of blue here and there. It’s time we hold them accountable for their choices. It’s time we get mad. It’s time we question whether the Majority, created and sustained by so many artifice, is a real majority and whether we should continue to allow empty population clusters to dilute the rightful political power of crowded population centers in a so-called representative democracy. This is a fight for power – raw and unadulterated. You may not like the fight, but you can’t afford to lose it.

There’s no more time to delude ourselves with feel good footage of America electing its first Black President or aspirations of compromise with the opposition party in a nonexistent post-racial America. It’s time we deal with, no we confront, the fact that 47% of the American electorate of 2008 voted for the senior Senator from Arizona, John McCain, the former Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin and their own fond memories of yester years gone by. It’s time to deal with why Boehner (and Bush) are back. They’re back because too many of the country’s citizens do "cling to their bibles and their guns" and to the much more insidious notion of an ‘Old America.’ The ‘Old America’ where they all knew where they stood in the pecking order and there were always some others (i.e. racial or ethnic minorities) beneath them.

The Republican Party invented and advanced a movement, the Tea Party Movement, and used it to give false comfort to and stir the animus of the Majority yearning for the 'Old America.' The Grand Old Party advanced a movement mired in an obsolete notion of Americans from a time when they were a victimized, oppressed, colonial people who suffered at the hands of an arrogant empire. The GOP shamelessly promoted this movement to reclaim its hold on power and to recapture its control of the distribution of the nation’s resources. I was amazed to watch the media frenzy over this unremarkable movement. But I was more amazed to see how unable its followers were to see how much of the world, including their non-Tea Partying fellow citizens, could view them as pining for a repugnant America. A nation that would itself be seen as an arrogant, oppressive empire, especially when combined with the constant conservative talking point of American Exceptionalism - a concept that sounds too much like Hitler’s talk of the superiority of the Aryan Nation.

They, the Majority, just refuse to acknowledge the obvious and the inevitable. We are living in a time of great and irreversible change. The Industrial Age replaced the Agrarian Age like the Iron Age replaced the Stone Age. Now the Knowledge Age is replacing the Industrial Age. It is causing a de-industrialization. It is causing the dispersion of capital and labor and much of what is going will never come back. This time of change is a revolution in culture and economy as great as the Industrial Revolution was, and as revolutions do, it will cause some to clash and leave others as casualties. It will also create a new pecking order.

We cannot go back. We need to move forward. I don’t know how you feel about it; but I want to live in a New America in the new age. The Conservatives have the Tea Party Movement for everybody who wants to go in reverse. But I want to join a different movement, a movement that is moving forward. I want to join a New America Movement. How about you?

S. danielle Out

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