{"id":2929,"date":"2004-11-03T00:16:03","date_gmt":"2004-11-03T16:16:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2004\/11\/03\/i-pledge\/"},"modified":"2019-12-11T13:43:51","modified_gmt":"2019-12-11T21:43:51","slug":"i-pledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2004\/11\/03\/i-pledge\/","title":{"rendered":"I pledge&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class='__iawmlf-post-loop-links' style='display:none;' data-iawmlf-post-links='[{&quot;id&quot;:9891,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/www.buzzmachine.com\\\/archives\\\/2004_11_01.html#008331&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/web-wp.archive.org\\\/web\\\/20120119074215\\\/http:\\\/\\\/www.buzzmachine.com\\\/archives\\\/2004_11_01.html&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-03-10 22:51:22&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:404},{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-07 01:31:51&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:404}],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:{&quot;date&quot;:&quot;2026-04-07 01:31:51&quot;,&quot;http_code&quot;:404},&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;},{&quot;id&quot;:9892,&quot;href&quot;:&quot;http:\\\/\\\/weblog.burningbird.net\\\/archives\\\/2004\\\/11\\\/02\\\/pledges-now-is-it&quot;,&quot;archived_href&quot;:&quot;&quot;,&quot;redirect_href&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/burningbird.net&quot;,&quot;checks&quot;:[],&quot;broken&quot;:false,&quot;last_checked&quot;:null,&quot;process&quot;:&quot;done&quot;}]'><\/div>\n<p>Apparently, Jeff Jarvis is proposing a &#8216;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.buzzmachine.com\/archives\/2004_11_01.html#008331\" title=\"Post Election Peace Pledge\">Post Election Peace Pledge<\/a>&#8216;.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  After the election results are in, I promise to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Support the President, even if I didn&#8217;t vote for him.<\/li>\n<li>Criticize the President, even if I did vote for him.<\/li>\n<li>Uphold standards of civilized discourse in blogs and in media while pushing both to be better.<\/li>\n<li>Unite as a nation, putting country over party, even as we work together to make America better.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Hmm. Working my way backwards, up the list.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Unite as a nation&#8230;.&#8221; Sounds good. Not sure if it&#8217;s possible. Bush, while billing himself as &#8220;a uniter, not a divider,&#8221; has done so well at tearing this country apart that I fear it&#8217;s going to be a long, long time before the wounds really start to heal (and I doubt they&#8217;ll have much chance to start healing if Bush stays in office).<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Uphold standards of civilized discourse&#8230;.&#8221; I&#8217;ve done my best to do that for a long time now. I may not always agree with everything I read, and the people who come here may not always agree with everything I say, but I&#8217;ve done my best to keep things civilized around here. Easy to sign on to this one.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Criticize the President&#8230;.&#8221; You bet your sweet bippy (and I&#8217;d do this were Kerry to win the office, too).<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Support the President&#8230;.&#8221; This is where I have problems. I can certainly recognize and accept the final results of the election, even if I don&#8217;t end up liking them. But should Bush win (as looks likely) &#8212; support? How can I support someone whose ideology is for all intents and purposes diametrically opposed to my own?<\/p>\n<p>How can I support someone who wants to declare some of my closest friends to be second class citizens merely because they love someone of their own sex? How can I support someone who cares more about lining his pockets and those of his cronies than doing anything to help the millions of poor and homeless in this country? How can I support someone who actually thinks cutting trees down is a viable way to save them from forest fires? How can I support someone willing, even eager, to plunge us into a war that, contrary to the Republican propaganda, was <em>not<\/em> connected to 9-11, and has cost over 1,000 American lives and as many as 100,000 Iraqi lives?<\/p>\n<p>Answer &#8212; I can&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>Later, Jeff updated his post after people asked him about this &#8220;support&#8221; issue.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  Commenters ask me what I mean by &#8220;support.&#8221; Right question. I do not mean blind support, love-it-or-leave-it support, with-him-or-against-him support. I mean acknowledging that the president is the president and especially in a time of war, we need to stand together against our enemies &#8212; namely, Islamofascist terrorists &#8212; and not act, as too many have during this administration (and the one before it) that the enemy is in the White House. No, we&#8217;re on the same side.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/weblog.burningbird.net\/archives\/2004\/11\/02\/pledges-now-is-it\/\" title=\"Pledges now, is it?\">At this point, I&#8217;ll turn the reins over to Shelley<\/a>, who responds to this far more intelligently and rationally than my first impulse was to do.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  That&#8217;s a little like the logic of saying to a person, &#8220;Have you stopped beating your wife yet?&#8221; Jarvis has framed the question so that it reflects what he considers our most dangerous enemy: Islamofascist terrorists. I can&#8217;t agree with his call for support, because I can&#8217;t agree with the definition of the enemy.<\/p>\n<p>  You see, I consider our worst enemy to be intolerance. Intolerance on the part of some Muslims about other non-Muslim people from the west, true. But also the intolerance demonstrated in this country towards gays, towards women, towards people of color, towards those who don t follow what others deem the One True and Right Way.<\/p>\n<p>  When Jarvis says will I pledge to support the President as he combats the enemy, my answer has to be, yes, if we can agree on what is the enemy.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And there&#8217;s the rub &#8212; if we work on the assumption that Bush will be keeping his hold on the Oval Office, than we&#8217;re in a Catch-22, for if the President agreed with me on what the enemy was, <em>than Bush wouldn&#8217;t be the President<\/em>. In many ways, Bush <em>is<\/em> the enemy, preaching his message of bigotry, hate, intolerance, and America \u00fcber alles.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t doubt that Jarvis means well with his pledge. But this is one pledge I won&#8217;t be signing on to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Apparently, Jeff Jarvis is proposing a &#8216;Post Election Peace Pledge&#8217;. I don&#8217;t doubt that Jarvis means well with his pledge. But this is one pledge I won&#8217;t be signing on to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2043,2042],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2929"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2929\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}