WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING | 2004-12-12
Let me tell you a little secret about politics. You know those "both sides" everybody talks about? While you are sleeping, they are getting together.
You don't actually have to be sleeping. You can be going nuts over Prayers in Schools or Six Day Evolution or the Holiness of a Single Cell, but meantime, "Both Sides" are quietly selling you out. I worked on Capitol Hill. I watched it happen all the time.
Issues like this give your so-called "leaders" a wonderful chance to keep your eye on the Golden Ball while they make their deals with no interference from you.
Conservative "leaders" march forth and thunder that they love one-celled "unborn babies" as much as they do their own children, that they stand for prayers in school, despite all the pressures against them (WHAT pressures?) and that they demand the right for creationism be taught in schools.
Liberals yell for the other side.
These things are a godsend for politicians.
The wonderful thing about your wasting your entire political life on that stuff is the attitude of everybody who actually has any power is:
"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn."
So while you are proud of yourself for marching boldly in favor of holly to decorate your school, the education establishment is working out a nice deal where it will eventually compromise and allow the right a few harmless school vouchers, while shouting all the way. The universities will still use your money to run their liberal seminaries.
While you obsess over Iraq's borders and Israel's borders, the third world will pour over yours. But they will be able to pray in your schools. Ain't that great?
While you are talking about freedom, the right wants to take your freedom away by "protecting the children" from pornography and the left want to censor anything it decides to call "Hate." Since the right wants to convince the left that it is more anti-racist than the left is, rightists will be proud to join the left in heavy censorship to stop both pornography and anything the left chooses to call "Hate."
People in real politics like the way you think. While you worry about Creationism and Holy One Cells, they'll take care of the stuff that matters.
Creationism? One-cell humans? Prayers in schools? The establishment would be far more frightened by one copy of Why Johnny Can't Think: America's Professor-Priesthood in a school than by ten thousand prayers, and you know it.