|
Give a moment or two to the angry young man/with his foot in his mouth and his heart in his hand
TigerhawkI came across letters of mine to the Des Moines Register back in the 1970s, which happened to coincide with my adolescence. They are hilarious, and will no doubt see the light of day on this blog at some point in the not-too-distant future. They reminded me that when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford in 1976 -- the fall of my 10th grade year -- I was miserable for days. . . . I was passionate about politics back then, meaning that I could work up a lot of joy or rage over politicians and elections. Naturally, then, this letter from one of Andrew Sullivan's readers reminded me of my youth: I'll just put that out there. If Obama is done in by this whole Wright thing I am done with politics. I can't invest myself in something that is so sure to disappoint me time and time and time again... Yeah, well, that's a pretty adolescent view of politics in a robust democracy. If your answer to losing is to declare yourself "done with politics," then you don't really have the stamina necessary to be a participating citizen. Which is just as well. Democracy requires the continuing participation of the losers, and if you do not have the stones to play the game again the next time then you are part of the problem, not part of the solution. The sooner the passionate people get disappointed and leave the government up to those of us mature enough to recover from the agony of defeat, the closer we will be to substituting casual, fun-loving partisanship for the bitter, spitting version that has dominated in the last 15 or 20 years. Put differently, Andrew Sullivan evidently thinks it is a problem if his passionate correspondent drops out of politics, and I think we would be better off if he did. I yearn for the days when we could talk about politics over beers with people of the other wing and walk away looking forward to the next such conversation. All these passionate, easily-disappointed, thin-skinned people take all the fun out of democracy, and make the country much harder to govern besides. Good riddance to 'em. Posted by: Mike 2008-05-01 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=238014 |