Second Meeting of the Shell Shocked Liberals

Second Meeting of Shell Shocked Liberals

This was the second meeting of shell shocked liberals I attended after Election Day 2004. It was Saturday, November 13 and there were six people at the meeting, with two toddlers to keep things from getting too serious. All of us Caucasian, middle to lower middle class. Four of us married. All of us consider ourselves patriots who love our country and revere the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. All of us were frightened, angry, and hopeful.

At one point when we were settling down around the kitchen table one of us said, "Oh, we're really having a meeting?" Someone else replied: "Yep. I'm sick of sitting around talking. This is where talking has brought us to." The room went silent for a moment and people nodded their agreement. It was in their faces; grave and unselfconscious. It was a simple acceptance of the self evident; nothing they didn’t already know.

What follows are what we discussed and decided on.

We love our Republic and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We are prepared to fight for the rights of the people we disagree with as well as the people we agree with. We want an America where everybody has a seat at the table: Liberals, Conservatives, religious, atheist, wealthy, middle class, poor, every race, age, sexual orientation, pro life, pro choice, mainstream, extremist. In this we affirm the principal of a political environment where no one ideology can possibly provide all solutions, not even ours, no matter how much we might wish it did. We believe that the problems we see go way beyond partisan politics, economic class, race, or creed.

We see evidence that the slow erosion of our Constitutionally guaranteed rights that has been going on for many years has been greatly accelerated by people in both the government and the private sector using the attacks on 9/11. If certain parts of the Moslem world can be our enemies, well then certain parts of our own political and economic system can be too.

We understand that the concentration of media in this country into the hands of five corporations, with the exception of certain sectors of the internet is deadly to the free and open discussion that is the lifeblood of a Republic.

We see ample evidence that the 2000 presidential election turned out the way it did because of voter fraud. Nor do we accept the authority of the Supreme Court to decide the result of an election. In the face of this we are unable to trust the results of the 2004 presidential election. We want no one elected by fraudulent means no matter what party they are affiliated with. It is irrelevant to us that this was done by a Republican administration. We understand that this could not have happened the way it did if certain elements in the Democratic party had not been in collusion with it.

We are working for anti trust action against the corporations who have centralized control of our Fourth Estate. (Fourth Estate = media)

We are working for the political equivalent of anti trust action against the Democratic and Republican parties. This will result in a truly multi party system. We want a run off ballot system more suitable to a multi party system rather than the simple majority voting under the current system.

We are ready to invest time and money into the electoral infrastructure of this country with an emphasis on making elections transparent and with active auditing from citizens from all different political beliefs.

Present for the meeting that night were Robin, Stephanie, Rick, Brenda, Gen, Vincent Present to keep us mindful of what was at stake were Audrey and Olivia; Robin and Stephanie’s two toddlers

To Do Items

Robin and Vincent to do an analysis using Sun Tzu’s Art of War of our main goals.
Brenda to do a paper on Fairness doctrine in media
Vincent to do a paper on the write in vote, how its been used, its history etc.
Stephanie to do keep on developing web sites such as fraught with fraud.
Robin and Vincent to do a report on open voting consortium openvotingconsortium.org
Rick to work on performance art type actions. We need slogans that are not so seemingly partisan!
Rick and Brenda to scout out meeting place in Montpelier. Some suggestions that came up during the meeting We adopt media people and correspond with them and inform them of issues. We adopt a whole media outlet, like a major television station, and do letter writing campaigns, etc. to persuade them that they can be more liberal without losing their audience.