[Mb-civic] SERIOUS OPINION from George Milman

[Michael Butler]

If one needs a glimpse of the kind of thinking that pervades our national
mind, check out this frightening article.
 
http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46178
 
We do, in fact, have what could be fairly called a national mind, and,
simply put, the measure of its intellect is seen in how we vote.  The
ability of power-grabbers to exploit that superstitious, anti-scientific,
anti-intellectual national mind, accompanied by the almost axiomatic
accompaniment of a stripping away of human rights and a fading of civility
is nothing new; it has just been raised to a more lethal and politically
dangerous level than we have seen in a while.  (Actually not that long a
while, sadly.)  Yet even in an age characterized by the ability of billions
of people to access more information than has ever been available to even
the most celestially placed elite‹and who are already venturing into the
cooperative richness of Web 2.0‹we Democrats, patriots, do not even have an
exit strategy from our war with those who actually take seriously the kind
of nonsense blatantly expressed in so many ways in the attached article.
 
Yet we remain with our friends in our own echo chamber, locked from the
inside like that of the Republicans.  We seem content there to wallow in our
misery; at the same time turning up the polarizing volume on more and more
florid tellings of the meanness, stupidity and ineptness of our
opponents‹qualities which they seem to have a dependable and endless
capacity to flash us with.  Until we recognize that our natural gravity
emanates from the critical need to focus on both immediate and long-term
plans to defeat the people standing in the way of the proper education of
our children and ourselves‹science-based to clear the fog of superstition
and fear that has dogged us from the beginnings of complex thought, combined
with a study of the beauty of individual, truly free expression manifest in
the liberal arts‹we are going to continue to live dangerously in
intolerance.