Web Letters: From Organizer to Elected Official

The disdain for community organizers expressed by Ms. Palin is emblematic of the conservative ideology. To them, there is no value in citizens providing services to other members of the community. They are openly against the idea of grassroots politics: in their world politics is reserved for the chosen few and, by and large, for the wealthy. Political acumen is the ability to be Machiavellian, and conniving and criminally minded puppeteers such as Karl Rove are lionized as geniuses by many, including the media. And there is no significant outrage against this!

How did we get to this deplorable state of affairs? I realize that progressives by nature need to be optimistic. But, there might be some clue in the article “5 Myths About Those Civic-Minded, Deeply Informed Voters,” by George Masson University associate professor, in the Sunday, September 7, edition of the Washington Post. Continuing to ignore the realities means continuing to ignore the need to find ways of encouraging rational thinking among vast majority of the people in the hinterland, in part under the opiate of evangelism and other sundry religio-political ideologies. No wonder, even in the twenty-first century, a significant portion of the people would not vote for a black man but would do so in a heart bit for a loud-mouth, corrupt, ultra-conservative mediocre governor of a state that has only a few people more than the District of Columbia!

M. Siddique

Chey Chase, MD