I'm offended ~ just slightly ~ to be categorized as a "Democrat." I'm much farther left that that! Now, I do vote regularly, usually viewing the matter as a choice between the lesser of two evils, and until a decade or so ago, I sometimes found Republican candidates who I was able to support. None recently, though ~ in fact none since about 1980...

Does anyone rememeber Phil Ochs? And his song "Love me, love me, love me, I'm a Liberal"? Back then, if "liberal" was a dirty word to anyone, it was to the young "New Left," who viewed the established Democratic-party professional liberals as accomodationists, as too far right. I'm thinking of Democrats like LBJ and Robert McNamara...

Now, the word "liberal" has been transformed into a dirty word denoting folks who are too far left on the political spectrum.

I have to second the thoughts expressed above by Spleen Cringe and Azizi. I would love to feel brotherhood with one and all, and on one level, a very far-removed spiritual level, I do. I'm just tremendously saddened that so very many people have been convinced to believe that just because they work in an office and not a coal mine, that they're not exploited workers, and that they somehow have more in common with the 2% of the population who are fattening themselves at everyone else's expense than with other hurting working folks. They allow themselves to be persuaded that they themselves are somehow "better" than the scapegoated minority populations a rung or two below them, when they themselves are not that far from the bottom of the ladder.

With the current hugely-financed propaganda push against a humane healthcare system, we're hearing more and more of the old argument that the reason that you and I are hurting financially is because the poor people are getting all the money! What a load of hogwash! This kind of thinking could never exist in a heterogeneous society like Japan, where virtually everyone is of the same ethnicity. Only in an diverse and open society like the US could such an opinion take hold, that groups even less privileged than oneself's could be blamed for the obscene and ever-increasing impoverishment of the vast middle-class majority.

In current-day America, it's Blacks, Latinos and gays. Not long ago, it was Jews in Germany and Catholics in occupied Ireland. I truly want to belive in the universal Brotherhood of Man, but it's difficult to do so when so many of my would-be brothers and sisters allow themselves to be persuaded to bear such irrational hatred against certain designated groups of others.