Love this post, the tone of it sounds like me before 2002 when others, even supposed friends, starting questioning my patriotism, because I questioned the President and his criminal abandonment of troops and peoples in Afghanistan to wage war in Iraq. I was right. I protested. I fought for my rights, and as a loyal American who engaged peacefully in public civil action, I am labeled a radical. The radicals in this country are 90% on the supposedly conservative side. I have been in the streets and halls of congress, marching and lobbying. Standing up for the rights that the founders of this country fought a revolution to secure for us is not radical, it is a civic responsibility of citizenship that few care to engage in any longer.
The middle has been usurped by conservative thought and action. The middle who stood quietly by as I was slandered by old classmates on elists (before Facebook) or in the streets as I was threatened with hanging for the "treason" of protesting, peacefully in front of a recruiting center, and by the way which the Tucson police would not respond to requests for protection from when proto-tea party and border militia extremists stabbed us with the metal eagle ferrules of the American Flags they carried and pushed elderly protesters into busy streets.
I hope you continue with your journey into understanding that there are costs to maintaining this grand experiment of American Representative Democracy, and one of them is speaking up when you see the hard earned rights and responsibilities of being a patriotic, or matriotic, American being sullied and desecrated by being treated as radicalism.
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