Just so you understand how important Steve Gilliard is to my work in the blogosphere

This is the one post that you should read over and over again, as I do, to understand what gets Liza Sabater's inner blogsheroe going.

I wrote Secular Blue America after an election "post mortem" written by Steve back in 2004. Steve's article is titled, They Voted For This Mess and it talked about how important it was for 'liberals' to understand that those who voted for Bush in 2004 were not stupid.

In Steve's reality check book, people who voted Republican did so because they had to:

Gilliard's is one long-winded rant that starts out hitting liberals good but ends up really tearing appart the post-election appeasement façade of the extremists ruling the Republican party. I wish he had spent more time flogging the "Liberals". Here's why :

So here's the thing. We're wrong. We have to stop. We have to do something different.

Let's examine this Laura. What she got from us: "Domestic violence workshops."

What she got from the church: food, a job, and people that said they loved her. The church gave her something to do, a narrative to organize her life around. Someone to tell her what to do.

Are we prepared to do that? To make her a bowl of soup, and sit there and hold her hand while she eats it, and pretend to love her, and force our narrative on her--to own her? To tell her what to think?

I think probably not. Because we're liberals. We believe in teaching her skills, in getting her a job, giving her a loan, maybe lecturing her. But she doesn't want to learn skills, she's weak and tired and afraid. She doesn't want to think.

And most people would rather be preached at by a preacher than a social worker.

We have this idealized image of our fellow humans: that human nature is perfectible, that people go for what's best for them, that given the opportunity, people want to be happy and free. We're liberals. We believe that, given equal access to information and resources, people will work toward happiness. That they will act for the best for themselves, their family, their community, their country and eventually, the world.

We're wrong.

What precedes this comment is a heart-wrenching description of the tribulations of a single, working poor, pregnant mother named "Laura". What he describes is the chasm between the life options offered by the church people who offered her real life support and encouraged her to vote Bush, and the bureucratic treatment of the liberal social-workers that marginally served her.

This one post by Steve is responsible for the last 3 years of my networking and community building work online and off. I am proud to say his legacy will live on at least in this one corner of the reality-based blogosphere.

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