Baraka_Guru

Wow, this is a tough bit to swallow. Centrism is a stance. What are you saying? That one must be either a communist or a fascist or they're copping out? Are Republicans copping out in their lite-rightism and should take a firm fascist stance and be done with it? Should Democrats forgo moderate positions that support both capitalism and social liberalism and just go ahead and be the socialists/communists that they're already labelled as?

You might see things in black in white, but in reality the world is in colour.

I think the underlying problem in America is a perpetual sense of crisis. Can you think of a time when America wasn't faced with a perceived crisis? I can't. America runs on fear. It was built on fear.

The current fear was triggered by an economic meltdown, so now people are lashing out at what they fear: liberalism, socialism, the "nanny state," entitlement spending, tax-and-spend Democrats, taxes, etc.

Before that, it was triggered by terrorism, and so people were pushing for war.

We could probably trace the entire history of America back long some trail made up by a pattern of crisis. The really interesting thing would be to determine how much of that is fabricated and how much of it is of legitimate concern.

Things would be so much easier if they were in black and white. I'm pretty sure popes, emperors, kings, and dictators believed so too. I'm pretty sure mainstream black and white thinking began to wane sometime during the Age of Enlightenment. However, I think the biggest shift occurred during the 20th century. Those damn French philosophers. They really made things confusing.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot