Odd Rallies

I just watched the reason TV coverage of Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally. I was struck by a few things.

a) it had nothing to do with honor at all.
b) the people there had no political similarities apart from being "not liberals".
c) they have no idea what they're mad about.

But I think I do, now. or I'm starting to get it.

See, a few years ago the internet was smaller, communication wasn't instant, and people were living quieter lives. It was easy, in those days, to say that you were a republican or a democrat and only focus on things like fiscal spending and taxes and foreign policy. You rarely thought about what your party thought about the social issues because they never came up. Your friends and neighbors, you assumed, mostly agreed with your point of view (whatever that was) and you figured politics was all about money and laws. Which is why less people were political at all.

But we no longer live in that world of blissful ignorance. And that is the world that is being protested here, I think. People are upset because they are now forced to accept that not everyone agrees with them. They liked freedom of religion when they didn't ever realize it applied to religions they don't like. They liked freedom of speech when they didn't think about it applying to someone they disagreed strongly with. They lived in a bubble, for the most part.

And it takes a long time to get comfortable with not living in that bubble.

You want to know why big cities like New York and LA are all so liberal? Because of those social issues that people never used to think about. Because while some guy from Bum Fuck Ohio never really thought about how freedom of speech or religion might apply to anyone but his friends, the people in these cities have lived it for decades. They don't care if you're gay or Muslim or a woman or black or a democrat or a republican. Because they've seen a million of those. They knew what the rest of the nation is just now starting to see ages ago and no longer care.

You think most of New York cares if there's a mosque two blocks from ground zero? Of course not. It's the rest of the nation, who never even really probably believed that Muslims were real till they were in their 20's. they were just some theoretical group in a theoretical place that might as well have been Hogwarts or Narnia.

These rallies are full of people who are mad, but don't know why. They feel like they've lost something and they don't know what. And that's because all they've lost is their blissful ignorance about the world.

They're starting to understand that they were terribly, horribly wrong about the world and they are not yet ready to just accept it and move on. They want something to be done about it, even though there really is nothing to be done. There are simply more things in heaven and earth than they have previously dreamed of (or let themselves dream of) and coming to terms with it is hard. Maybe if enough of them protest, it'll just go away. But it will not, because there's nowhere for it to go. You can't vote reality out of office.