Well, my friend Melvin and I walked downtown to take part in the big student rally against Bush today. It was pretty much just exactly as I suspected it would be: a bunch of kids shouting slogans.
The idealism of the far left/youth movement hasn't been refreshing in a long time, in fact, I posit that it was one of the reasons the Democrats lost the last election. During the election Kerry had a difficult time convincing Middle America that he could keep them safe. I believe this was due, in part, to the amount of airtime that the youth/far left usually gets on the evening news. Aside from Kerry's "I was against the war before I was for the war," or whatever the hell it was, what Middle America heard was the "No war," chant of liberal idealogues. One can just hear the neo-cons saying, "See, these people won't do anything to keep you safe from Oama's minions." So the soccer mom, who tends to vote liberal, votes for Bush because she thinks he's going to keep her precious rug-rats safe from the terrorists. I blame the news outlets to a large degree. It takes very little effort to go get footage of a crowd of kids chanting "No war." It takes a lot of airtime to actually talk about why attacking Afghanistan may or may not have been justified, while attacking Iraq definitly was not, and why that's the case. That type of debate doesn't easily break down into a 10 secend sound-bite. At any rate, I find it very ironic that these kids recognize, at least to some degree, the evil that Nazism was when they equate Bush with Hitler, but if you follow their logic out, they wouldn't have bothered to actually fight the Nazis.
The idealism of the far left/youth movement hasn't been refreshing in a long time, in fact, I posit that it was one of the reasons the Democrats lost the last election. During the election Kerry had a difficult time convincing Middle America that he could keep them safe. I believe this was due, in part, to the amount of airtime that the youth/far left usually gets on the evening news. Aside from Kerry's "I was against the war before I was for the war," or whatever the hell it was, what Middle America heard was the "No war," chant of liberal idealogues. One can just hear the neo-cons saying, "See, these people won't do anything to keep you safe from Oama's minions." So the soccer mom, who tends to vote liberal, votes for Bush because she thinks he's going to keep her precious rug-rats safe from the terrorists. I blame the news outlets to a large degree. It takes very little effort to go get footage of a crowd of kids chanting "No war." It takes a lot of airtime to actually talk about why attacking Afghanistan may or may not have been justified, while attacking Iraq definitly was not, and why that's the case. That type of debate doesn't easily break down into a 10 secend sound-bite. At any rate, I find it very ironic that these kids recognize, at least to some degree, the evil that Nazism was when they equate Bush with Hitler, but if you follow their logic out, they wouldn't have bothered to actually fight the Nazis.
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