Americans Should Not Be Anti-American

As this post by the irresistible Carpet Bagger reminds us, it's always better to question your opponents motives than to attack their agenda. You can denounce right-wing amendments against flag burning, foreign languages, prayer haters, or abortion; but it's far more effective to insist that they're doing it to divide our country. Primarily because it's true. They want us to attack these amendments as it helps them paint us as anti-American, Spanish-speaking, Christian-bashers. Or as they like to say, America's Enemies. They don't care if it's true. And they are pretty damn sure that the amendments won't pass. They just want us to defend a point of view which we won't naturally defend unless they prompt us. Left to our own devices, we wouldn't talk about these issues at all. That's why they continue to bring them up.

Are all conservatives so shallow and politically wily to be in on this? Of course not. But it never hurts to tarnish your opponents motives. After all, that's one of the main weapons that they've been using against us for years. Why do we support welfare? Because we want to keep black people poor and dependent on Democrats. Why were we against the Iraq war? Because we hate America and President Bush and we want to keep America dependent on foreign nations which are socialist. Why do we support big government, because we want Big Brother to nurture us from cradle to grave so that we remain dependent on Democrats, while punishing successful people. Is any of that true? Of course not. They're complete jokes and should only be laughed at.

Yet people believe it. I correspond with too many nutjobs who really do believe that Liberals have horrible anti-American motives for everything. They short-circuit discussion of the issues by focusing solely on our motives for supporting these issues. And rather than appearing to be well-intentioned people who disagree about solutions, we're seen as being evil or stupid. And there can be no discussion with evil, by definition.

And certainly the left-wing does this too. Iraq war is for oil, tax cuts to benefit the rich, and environmental destruction to help big business. But the difference is that those certainly are motivations for the right-wing agenda. Not all conservatives for sure. But there are far more conservatives who think the rich need a tax cut than there are liberals who want welfare dependents. There is some truth to the claims we make; while they're claims should be considered too absurd to believe.

But my point is that we need to take this to the next level and start rightly questioning their motives on EVERYTHING. Rather than defending flag-burning, abortion, and anti-prayer laws, we need to start attacking them for even bringing up these divisive issues. The Republican leadership doesn't want to pass any of that stuff. They just want something they can rally the troops around by blasting us, while they pretend to be morally strong and Pro-American. But there's nothing American about making Americans hate other Americans. I strongly support people who take a stand for what they believe in, but not if that stand requires them to hate my stand. We're all in this together, and it is our differences of opinion that make our country so great. We need to stop allowing conservatives to use those differences to tear us apart, or they may finally succeed in doing so.