And I know the reason. We wanted a simpler world, we longed for an idealized Beaver Cleaver America trhat never really existed, except for maybe a few well-off white folks in the Midwest. Maybe, I never met any and I sure as hell wasn't one. We wanted a world in which poor people weren't afraid to tell us they were angry about being poor, and colored people were fed up with being colored, a world where we won the Viet Nam war, a world where there was no crime and no dope and no hippies, and where people knew their place and were polite and didn't cause trouble. A world where if you played by the rules you would eventually be rewarded. We didn't lose that world, we've been building it.

The Conservatives promised us that world. But they couldn't deliver. You see, Jody, America has always been a liberal country. All the way back to the founding fathers we have been unsatisfied with the status quo, we wanted change, we wanted justice, we wanted freedom, security AND opportunity. Maybe by the standards of any particular time in history there were ugly and unfair things going on here, but there were also people trying to change them, and others trying to stop them from bringing change. And the debate has always sounded just like the one we have on this forum right now.

Every major single piece of labor, social, welfare, civil, consumer and environmental legislation started here, in this country. And every single one has been resisted and disputed and obstructed by those who promised the end of civilization if we dared change things. We have always been too liberal for the comfortable, the satisfied, the well-off, the smug; those who had already "made it" and were in no mood to share any of it. And they have fought that progress and reform tooth and nail with every bit of ferocity and guile they could muster. And they have lost every single time, too.

Is the process smooth, without problems, without setbacks, without excesses and even downright mistakes? Of course not. And even the conservatives are sometimes right and occasionally have something of value to offer; caution and restraint, if nothing else. But America IS a liberal country, it always has been, that is why people have scrambled from all over the world to get here. Because it was always dissatisfied and improving itself, or at least trying to. And it's why they still come here.

I know this, Jody. I was born here, my parents were born here, but I remember my grandparents talking about the old country and how things changed after they came here. I have a sense of American culture viewed with the authority of one who has lived it all his life but who also had the perspective to compare and contrast it with family memory and personal history. America ain't just the Mayflower and powdered wigs, and tricorns in stately Virginia plantations. It's Ellis Island and satanic mils and picket lines and Pinkerton goons, too.

And that's why for some of us it is never liberal enough, and why for others it has always been much too liberal.