The Cudgel Manifesto

Rob Kall has challenged us to dump the Democrats, take up our cudgels and split some neocon skulls.  He urges us to do this by building bottom-up coalitions via the internet.  And he is correct, but...

Once we have our coalition, what do we do with it? What do we say?  In answering these questions, we have to take the following into consideration:

A progressive coalition, no matter how well organized, will go nowhere unless it can generate crossover appeal.  We can no longer afford to preach to the choir.  We must appeal to the NASCAR dad, the soccer mom, the hockey mom and the Redneck kicking back a Pabst in his cabin.

This means we must lose our ideological prissiness and start listening instead of preaching. 

We need a simple message of almost poetic compression that the public, as a whole, can wrap itself around.

We don't need to educate the public; we need to inspire them.

The bulk of the problems we are facing today are a result of our empire building.  Empire is bankrupting us; empire is corrupting our democratic values; empire has made us a pariah among the nations of the world. 

The message I am suggesting is simple:

It is time we dismantled our empire and redirected our resources to healing America. 

And that is our clarion call:

Heal America!

To the mother still awake in the wee hours of the morning, praying that her baby's fever breaks before sunrise because she has no health insurance, we say, "The money that should have financed your single-payer health plan is paying for Joe Liberman's $2.5 billion submarine, the one that's going to take out Osama's rowboats."

To the parents watching helplessly as their children's school programs are eliminated becase the school's federal funding has been cut we say, "That money is being used to pay for the 500,000 gallons of fuel the Pentagon uses every day to fight their imperial wars."

To the politicians who prattle on about "national security" we ask, "How does that heal America?" 

When neocons talk about protecting Israel we ask, "How does that heal America?"

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