What A Bunch Of Whitebread Weaklings

I'm not going to go into the genesis of this rant, but can I just say that the common-knowledge majority held belief here in the U.S. that anything "radical" is wrongheaded and not to be taken seriously, except as a threat, pisses me the fuck off.

Look people, in context of their time and the system of government they lived under, the Founding Fathers were radicals. Martin Luther King was a radical, at least according to the FBI. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were radicals. Frederick Douglas was a radical.

Without radicals, we'd still be living in a country where slavery is legal and women voting is not. Without radicals, there'd be no government oversight (pitiful as it is) of what massive, amoral corporations put into your food or medicine, what they dump into your water, what they pump into your air. Without radicals, there'd be no such thing as sexual freedom or privacy. Without radicals, the eight-hour workday wouldn't exist, there'd be no such thing as a minimum wage and workplace safety would be a complete oxymoron.

It's time for people to wake up and realize that mealy mouthed, nicey-nice moderation accomplishes absolutely nothing.

I don't mean to imply that radicalism is always good or beneficial, but when mainstream liberals sneer at the "radical left" they are ignoring, willfully, a major lesson of history, which is that when significant change is needed, it's always the radicals who get things rolling and force change on an unwilling and generally moderate population.

When moderates are in charge, nothing changes. That's not always bad, but it's not the one and only ideal state of things, either.