From outside the box

It is amazing, amusing, and a little bit sad as I read all the right wing hits against the Live Earth concerts. It seems that every time people try to change things, usually to fix an injustice or make the world a better place, the vision challenged conservatives start whining about how wrong the visionaries (progressives) are to even try. If it wasn't for people with a vision speaking out we would still be in Vietnam, blacks would be riding in the back of busses, there would be no recycling, Americans would still be paying taxes to England, Joe McCarthy may have been president in the fifties, women would not be voting, there would be no labor unions, Christian dogma would be law, folks would still be serving life sentences in Texas prisons for possession of a joint (a marijuana cigarette), and we would still be afraid to journey too far out into the ocean for fear of falling off the end of the earth.

The main difference between conservatives and liberals is this. Conservatives say that if it isn't broken then don't fix it. Liberals say it is broken and it must be fixed. So I guess it depends on what you mean by the word "broken". Supporting the status quo, never questioning those in charge, being afraid of change, only having enough sight to see the smaller picture, getting stuck in ancient traditions, my way or the highway, America, love it or leave it, these are ways of saying that it isn't broken. Liberals are saying that although there is a lot of right with America, there is a lot of broken areas and to survive as a free democracy, and indeed as a species, we must keep fixing, tweaking, adjusting, and changing.

Now when we fix, tweak, adjust, and change, we often do these things not being sure of the outcome. Sometimes the outcome is painful and sometimes disastrous. I'm talking about things like welfare, late term abortions, unions abusing their power, busing, preferential hiring, and a whole list of liberal based causes that really haven't worked very well, but can with the proper tweaking and adjusting. But here's the thing, we've got to try. Growth is always going to be painful, there will always be mistakes and then adjustments periods. Not knowing the outcome of something or being afraid of criticism is never a reason to stay with the status quo, especially when the status quo is defending something that is broken!.

So the Live Earth event may have generated a lot of pollution. We are loosing our planet and although mistakes will be made, we must do something, we must at least try! Isn't the purpose of Live Earth to bring more awareness to something that is either broke or in the process of breaking? I'm not sure that self centered, jet setting rock stars should be the spokespersons for changing our environment, but it's a start, at least somebody is trying something. We can learn from our mistakes and find more effective ways to get the message out in the future. I wish the conservatives would stop shooting the messengers and pay more attention to the message.

And to any liberals that would bash people like Anthony Watts for doing the research he is doing, they are totally missing the point. At least Anthony is trying to use science to back his beliefs, unlike many conservatives who would say that global warming is a hoax just because their political party or Rush Limbaugh says it is. The main point that many liberals are missing is this; we want the nay sayers on global warming to be right. We want to be wrong on this one. I hope we are proven wrong! But as I have mentioned in an earlier posting, we still have a polluted planet and we must do more than we are doing to change things, to clean up our messes and stop making more messes.