Why I Eschew Being a `Pragmatic' Predator Drone-Apologist Liberal
The word Liberal has left a bad taste in my mouth since I became politicized back in 1967. Since then, the bad taste has only gotten worse.
I much prefer the label Radical.
1. of or going to the root or origin; fundamental: a radical difference.
2. thoroughgoing or extreme, especially as regards change from accepted or traditional forms: a radical change in the policy of a company.
3. favoring drastic political, economic, or social reforms: radical ideas; radical and anarchistic ideologues.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/radical
Below from C3 list.
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"And this is precisely why I eschew being a "pragmatic" predator drone-apologist liberal or a purity-swooning conservative: A compulsion towards partisanship serves to censor the disorderly dialog of the heart, and thus compels one to remain locked within an ego-fortified structure of imprisoning platitudes and self-serving rationalizations."
"The fact that so many U.S. citizens continue to believe that they inhabit a democratic nation, devoted to the concept of freedom of speech, of the press, and of free assembly reveals something very troubling: that the internalization of the tacit tenets of the corporatist state (a mutant strain of classic fascism) is now embedded so deeply in the collective psyche of the U.S. populace, and has rendered all too many with only a cursory, at best, understanding of what civil liberties involve.
Withal, it is not possible to grieve (or become outraged at) the loss of something one has no concept of ever having existed in the first place. How is it possible for one who has spent his entire lifetime in a windowless prison to know the grief experienced by fellow inmates who have known the beauty beheld when viewing the prismatic light of a dawning day?
Those who have encased themselves in a self-referential bubble of rationalization, by reflex, dismiss the assertion that complicity in an odious system (such as a blood-sustained, militarist empire) amounts to silent affirmation of the harm the system (although nebulous in nature) reaps.
By doing so, they unwittingly exact punishment upon themselves. Such unfortunate souls continue to exist. Yet to exist in such a manner, one must circumvent one's senses and blinker the life of the mind, thereby becoming like a caged wild animal that, as the years have passed, has forgotten what its true nature is, because its essential self has atrophied into mere mind-numbing subsistence.
What kind of a life is this, you may well ask? But you already know the answer: It is no life.
There exists one requisite trait needed to face evil: The knowledge of one's own capacity for embodying the trait. Inseparable, treachery and redemption arrive together. The human heart, capable of both cruelty and kindness, provides the arena where one's better nature might gain the upper hand against one's destructive inclinations."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/08/15-0