Small Town Liberals in a Smoke Filled Room

Small Town Liberals in a Smoke Filled Room

A meeting of the shell shocked took place at my apartment on Wednesday November 10, 2004. Present were Bruce, Terry, and myself. All three of us liberals. All three middle aged middle class white guys. We¹ve known each other for 3 1/2 years, but have not socialized very much outside of work. Two heterosexual, one bisexual. As far as I know I was the only one of us who¹d had a lot of activist experience. (I've been active on and off since the early 80s in the Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual civil rights movement.) We talked for about two hours. Terry and I enjoyed some fine cigars prior to, and during the early part of, this meeting. We all keenly enjoyed the irony of meeting in a smoke filled room. I particularly enjoyed it given the Left's absurd Puritanism about tobacco.

The reason we were meeting in the first place is that we are scared about a lot of what is going on in our Republic. We are seeing our civil liberties being taken away. We think that the presidential election of 2000 turned out the way it did because of fraud. We believe that Iraq was invaded because special interests in this country want to control the oil there. We see all the media in our country owned by 5 corporations. We are wrestling with the understanding that the leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties, along with many members of the political, economic, and intellectual elite are not even discussing

We are tired, desperately tired, of voting for the lesser of two evils.

We had a free ranging talk that night. We discussed if we actually do have a two party system, or if we have a one party system with two different wings. We could not decide if we wanted to start a new organization or if we wanted to support organizations that already exist. If we wanted to support the idea of Vermont succeeding from the Republic as political performance art. How the write in vote could be used as a very conservative tool for radical change. That we do not trust electronic voting because it makes the results of elections ultimately only verifiable by technicians. That we do not feel represented in the media because with the possible exception of the Internet, you need many millions of dollars to get your message across. That I, for the first time in my adult life, was working on something other than the queer civil rights issue because now I felt that all of our civil rights were in danger.

Five main points came from our discussions. First, that we ultimately don't know if we can overcome this decay. Nations, like individuals, have life cycles. It just may be that we are devolving from a Republic to a totalitarian or authoritarian state no matter what we do. Second, if this turns out to be the case, we need to discuss the desirability and feasibility of exit strategies. Third, that we want to be as nonpartisan as we can about this. We want Republicans, and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, atheists and religionists, every group who sees the problems and wants to work on them as a part of the reform process. Fourth, we all felt that we needed to do lots of research into these issues before we could make major decisions as to what we will do next. Fifth, we don't know if we can reach much less effectively educate enough people in order to make a real difference.

The meeting was exhilarating for me because, first, it happened at all, and in so many countries we could have never openly met. It was upsetting because two of three of us left unable to commit themselves to being hopeful.