has to be “take back our country.” It drove me nuts when I heard it ad nauseam from liberals over the past eight years, and it’s continuing to drive me nuts now that I’m hearing it from conservatives. Not to go all Woody Guthrie on everyone, but this sort of language logically implies that the country has been improperly “taken” by those who have no right to it, that it’s “ours” not “theirs” and we have the right to “take it back” from whoever isn’t “us”—and this is just bunk. It’s all of a piece, attitude-wise, with the folks in Colorado a few years ago who were trying to change the law to allocate the state’s Electoral College delegates proportionally rather than on a winner-take-all basis, supposedly because “their votes hadn’t counted” in 2004 because Bush won the state’s delegates. Yes, their votes counted; they lost. That’s how the system works.
In the same way, my vote counted last November, and on the national level, my side lost. The idea that this somehow means that “my country” has been “taken” from me and that I have the right to “take it back” is pure tripe of the most arrogant and self-righteous kind. Yes, we need to do a better job of articulating conservative principles—which means, in part, to pick candidates who can do so, preferably because they actually believe in those principles—but we have no standing to claim any sort of entitlement to victory. Quite the contrary. Learn to lose gracefully, people, and take to heart the lessons of defeat—of which the most important is humility; not only does that make the process of coming back to win the next time shorter and smoother, it makes us better people in the process.
Hear! Hear!
I'm also sick of the "impeach" so and so movement… when I'm thinking what have they done to be "impeached" other than disagreeing with their ideology?
If we need to get them out of their position we need to beat them at the ballot box. Don't want Nancy Pelosi to be the Speaker? Then we need to help Republicans take back the House in 2010. That's the legitimate way to do it.
Anything else seems like whining.
It's the whine that really irks me, I think.
Right on all counts. Most disturbing is when Christians get caught up in the entitlement mindset you describe here. Aren't we supposed to surrender our "entitlements" when we commit to following Christ, anyway?
That's a very good point; I hadn't thought of things in quite that way, but you're right.
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