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2004-09-09 - 11:33 p.m.

i am reposting here a rant i received from a conservative friend in southern california. i repeat, i did NOT write what follows. he is responding to a letter i sent him via snail mail.

I'm just not quite sure what you're protesting. We have a dual party system. Each party has a convention. Nobody protested outside the democratic convention.

Protesting doesn't win elections or lose them. It doesn't do anything except piss everybody off and make the protestors look like idiots. Everybody thinks half the people there are trying to get laid and the other half think Bush was hatched from a martian egg by the black helicopters. It's an excercise in pointlessness and it shuts down the city.

I think that crowd hates Bush because he's slammed home the reality of the world and everybody hates him for it. They hated waking up and staring at reality. They were protesting reality. They want to live in a place where humanity isn't humanity and history isn't history. It's likehating crime and outlawing cops. And don't give me some BS about how that's a good idea. If you think that's a good idea, go to Mogadishu. You could probably get under a warlords wing, if he wanted a little sexual variety...

When I was eleven, I arrived in Madrid on the day after a whole city block was taken out by the Basques. When I was fourteen, I lived behind jersey barriers to protect us from suicide bombers and couldn't leave the base because German hippies blocked the road.

I've been to Arab countries and totalitarian ones. Liberal America is just waking up and they don't like it. The world is not like South Orange County. In fact, Williamsburg is a fucking garden spot and an oasis of wealth and prosperity compared to say... 99% of the places on earth.

(Now see what you've done. Whether that is the case or not, the sheer uselessness of the protests makes me see it in that light. There cannot be an intelligent reason for it now. Your reasons are fairly superficial. A half million people being idiots for ridiculous reasons. It doesn't help your cause. Saying you don't like Kerry but you're protesting Bush doesn't seem workable. Are you opposed on artistic grounds?)