Bad People Are Buddhas, Too

Across the continuum of progressive dialogues today, too much rending of garments, too much self-hate, too many suggestions for attacks on moderate Republicans and for shifting the Democratic platform to the right. Too much fear and trembling when the rubes shook the codewords "moral values" at us like voodoo dust, shivering our liberal bleeding hearts.

Fuck that.

When you give up your values to get a shot at the power to implement them, what do you have when you get that power? Not the values you gave up---they're gone. Keep telling yourself that all you need is to get your hands on the power and then everything will be all right, then you'll be able to do things the way you wanted. But in abandoning the things you once stood for you work such a change on yourself that, by the time you get into the catbird seat, you won't even recognize what you used to be.

You want immoral? It's immoral to grind people into the ground till their health breaks to feed the fat cats on Wall Street.

It's immoral to wrest control of people's bodies away from them when it's convenient and let them have deadly weaponry to unleash other others when it's not.

It's immoral to let people freeze on the streets because "personal responsibility" excuses greed and callousness, and it's immoral to pull the plug on poor neighborhoods and struggling farms while funneling subsidies and pork to rich developers and agribusiness.

It's immoral to support a lying piece of manipulative shit who gets his biggest hard-ons humiliating those weaker than he is, and dropping munitions far, far away on 40,000 children too dark to matter.

If that's your moving to the right, no thanks. If I want to belong to the Republican party with their "moral values", I can re-register.