As With the Circle

Since I posted my previous entry, I have received a couple of thought-provoking messages, one from Eric Blair and another from a fellow regular commenter at Moxie's named Cond0010. First, let's consider what Eric had to say. For those who may be new here, Eric is, like me, a college professor.

So yesterday was our department meeting.

Please keep in mind that I never, ever discuss politics with my colleagues, let alone students. Several of my departmental colleagues were big Howard Dean and Dennis Kucinich supporters. Mazel tov. Again, I don't discuss it. I find it to be unprofessional and not collegial.

Anyway, at our official departmental meeting, the Chair brought in a cake, in the shape of the United States, frosted entirely blue. Plus champagne.

The banter was anti-Republican, but not awfully so. Lots of laughter about "finally" winning.

I kept thinking this...

What if McCain had won, and I had done a mirror image of the same things at that meeting? Champagne and a cake frosted red. All red, I remind you. What would have been the result? Do you think my colleagues would have shrugged their shoulders, and said "Hey, Eric, I disagree with you, but you have a right to your opinion. Pass me a piece of Wyoming, please?"

Hardly.

So I once again kept my mouth shut. I seem to do that a lot, which is ironic to my students, since I run little else than my mouth in the classroom and lab.

But that meeting was unprofessional and inappropriate. And there isn't anything that could be said about it by an untenured person like me. I just have to let it go. I'm not bulletproof and I have learned before the cost of speaking my own mind.

The people at my department meeting aren't evil monsters. They are good people. In fact, only three people out of ten even said anything remotely partisan. But partisanship has reduced those three to the basest level of portraying political differences as character defects. So I am mindful of how things look "on the other side," which is the only good that can come of such partisanship.

Again, the smartest move is to imagine actions, statements, laws, and the like in the hands of one's bitterest enemies. That is the ONLY way that good law, fair law, cautious law can be enacted. Because pendulums swing, no matter how much both sides wish that not be so when it is in their favor.

Partisanship is corrosive. Dissent is patriotic, as I heard endlessly over the past eight years. Actually, I hope that I don't learn that dissent is racist nowadays, but that remains to be seen. I will not act as the Democrats did in 2000 and 2004. I would like to think that Republicans are better than that.

I would like to think that Republicans are better than that as well, but at the same time I have no intention of unilaterally disarming myself before those who utterly despise me and my way of life.

Now to be sure, most of my own colleagues are not monsters, either. I've known most of them for the better part of a decade, and there are some I really quite like and have become close to. Some of them feel as negatively about Sarah Palin as I feel positively about her - and that does not disturb me. Such political differences exist even within my own family. Civil, and even spirited discussions are possible with reasonable people.

But not all are reasonable. Someone who mocks Border Patrol agents or American troops - people who put their lives on the line to protect the liberty of all Americans - is not a reasonable person. Someone who spreads malicious lies about Sarah Palin, essentially saying that she is a stupid slut and a primitive religious zealot (a composite of some insults thrown her way), is not a reasonable person. Such unreasonable people will receive no quarter within the confines of this blog.

I wonder how those who claim to be paragons of diversity, tolerance, and all things supposedly "nice" can justify attacks on true innocents like Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher or Sarah Palin's children. I am, though, not surprised that they do. They're the same type of people who consigned our allies in Southeast Asia to Communism during the early 1970s, forced the abandonment of Angola to Marxist revolutionaries in 1975, tried to cede Nicaragua to the Soviet Union's global empire during the 1980s by cutting off funds to Contra freedom fighters, and pilloried George W. Bush for having the temerity to take the fight to anti-American Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and Iraq during the first decade of this century.

They would rather that millions suffer or perish under the heel of genocidal tyrants than entertain the possibility that their own nation, and many of its leaders they so rabidly hate, just might be a force for good in this troubled world. So many on the left don't realize or care that their pacifism can lead and has led to the very horrors they perceive the conservative demons of their imagination must intend.

On that point, here is what Cond0010 had to say after reading my previous entry:

If that manling/professor had any sense of humanity and a good sense of history, he seems to have forgotten the horrific suffering that was there BEFORE the Americans came to Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban.

If he thinks the Democrats will make peace in that area by having us pull out, perhaps you should remind him of all the deaths that occurred in SE Asia after the US pulled out of Vietnam due to the massive cutting of military funds by the Democrat Congress.

The blood of millions of innocents is on the hands of the Passive-Aggressive Democrat Congress that cut the US military funds for the campaign in SE Asia (Vietnam).

Sirak Mitak put it quite well:
_____

I will always remember the message from Cambodian statesman Sirak Mitak who penned a final note to the U.S. ambassador refusing his offer of evacuation just days before his execution at the hands of the Khmer Rouge:

“I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty….You leave and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under the sky.

But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we all are born and must die one day. I have only committed this mistake in believing in you, the Americans.”

http://fallbackbelmont.blogspot.com/2006/11/un-bel-di.html
_____

We all know what happened AFTER the US military left, don’t we? Millions and millions of deaths occurred. Of course our education system and media downplays the actual direct cause of those deaths, but we won’t go there.

Perhaps you could give him the quote from Sirak Mitak and then the amount of deaths that happened due to that pull out?

Maybe even pin it to his door as a Red Badge of Courage for his desires for retreat in Afghanistan?

The thought of pinning such a message to his door is certainly tempting, but it is something that a non-tenured professor like me could never do, for fear of professional reprisals. As any career academic will tell you, a professor without tenure - especially one so lowly as an adjunct - is at the very bottom of the faculty food-chain. At some point my status will change for the better, but it hasn't yet.

Until then, I will just have to be content with blowing off steam on this blog and at other blogs I frequent.

But take heart, my fellow conservatives and Republicans. While we may be out of power for the next few years, we will be back and our vision of liberty, freedom, and prosperity will ultimately prevail over the soul-destroying socialism of Barack Obama. We won the Cold War, we can win this. As with the circle, all things return.

Update (2:22 am CST):

Yeah, I know. I need to go to sleep.

Anyway, take a look at this: from 52 to 48 with love.

So the same people who for eight years called Americans like me fascist warmongers and stooges of McChimpy Bushitler now want me to join hands with them and sing "Kumbaya"?

Well, I've got a photo for them:


Do svidaniya, suckers.