Reply #30: Hey, I know what you mean, and I'm [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

straight and religious besides.

I feel as if I'm hiding out in my safe little corner of SW Minneapolis, which went 80% for Kerry, and going into the suburbs or turning on network TV gives me culture shock equal to what I suffered going to Japan for the first time.

It's scary to think that so many of my fellow Americans are delusional. They may still be nice people if you stay away from politics, but more and more, they're reminding me of what the school nurse at our high school once told our class about the Afrikaners in South Africa when we were reading Cry the Beloved Country.

She and her husband went to South Africa as short-term medical missionaries in a rural area, and all the local white people were Afrikaans. She said that her first impression of them was highly favorable: they were as hospitable and helpful as could be, and before she and her husband knew it, they had dinner invitations for nearly every night of the week.

But once they actually went to dinner in some of these tidy little farmhouses, they were appalled to see how the farmers treated their black servants and how they talked about black people. This nurse said that it was as if there was one part of their brain that had been taken over by the devil. (She was an evangelical in the days when evangelical and Republican were not synonymous, so those are the terms she used.)

That's how I feel about a lot of my fellow citizens, that a portion of their brain has been reprogrammed by, if not the devil, then by a multipronged media attack.