First Posted: 3/23/2015
It must be a great responsibility to be the only informed voter in America. Defining “liberal” for online wags, most of whom haven’t lived long enough to distinguish between principle and cliché, is a tough job. The Limbaugh/Gandhi/ Devil’s Advocate admixture in these Internet debates, is quaint.
And how much information is essential to ink in a few circles when you’d have the same luck tossing dice or a two-headed coin? Casting a ballot is like picking a watermelon: you don’t know what you’re getting until you split it open.
Voting—largely ceremonial today — is corollary to the delusion of freedom. When men learned how to spell “liberty” and to use it in a sentence, they began to lose it and to justify depriving others of it. They chained themselves to the idea that it had to be continually defended, mostly at the expense of everybody else’s lives.
Americans now live at the discretion of armed men and those who are self-licensed to act out their worst compulsions on society. Which freedom could you not forfeit to have your children walk to school without fear of violence or abduction?
The Founding Fathers were liberals in their time, “leftists” and revolutionaries against established government: “the right.” But the sentiment inherent in the then radical phrase “All men are created equal” (history has taught) had — and evidently still has — a tight circle of application, excluding e.g., men of different skin color, and voting preferences.
What’s a liberal?
Try and find one.
