Hello, I was sitting down to do a posting on a new support group for liberal activists and couldn’t decide how I wanted to write it. There was so much humor and irony in the original story that I felt anything more than a straight reporting of it would be overkill. However it was so ripe for pithy remarks that I really wanted to put a few in. In the spirit of reader choice, I’m going to publish both posts and let you the readers decide which you prefer. When reading option A (the straight reporting) please note that the source of quotes and information was the Los Angeles Times and not The Onion.

Option A: uneditorialized report

Attention Liberals! Here is an answer to your calls for help. With the red-state dominance in the last election, the war in Iraq, changes in environmental policy, and the possibility of a more conservative Supreme Court, many activists are feeling blue. What they need, claims noted liberal activist Jerry Rubin, is therapy. In fact, he’s created a support group, The Activists Support Circle, so that liberals can share their frustration in a safe environment and be there for each other. According to Rubin, this is a place where liberals can “talk, listen, cry, hug, and complain.”

According to one of the group’s facilitators, “there are so many activists who express just abject despair about what’s going on…that it’s hard to get up in the morning and do the normal things in life.” One of the more common complaints of the activists is that non-activists don’t want to hear about their feelings of woe forcing them to keep these emotions bottled up until they burst into full-on depression.

Option B: the editorialized version

Attention Liberals.! Here is an answer to your calls for help. With the red-state dominance in the last election, the war in Iraq, changes in environmental policy, and the possibility of a more conservative Supreme Court, many activists are feeling blue. What they need, claims noted liberal activist Jerry Rubin, is therapy. (No, what they need is an electable presidential candidate and a platform that doesn’t treat taxpayers like bottomless pits of money).

In fact, he’s created a support group, The Activists Support Circle, so that liberals can share their frustration in a safe environment and be there for each other. According to Rubin, this is a place where liberals can “talk, listen, cry, hug, and complain.” (Whining, bitching, crying, hugging activists? You have just described either 1) my version of Hell; or 2) a new episode of Showtime’s “The L-Word”).

According to one of the facilitators, “there are so many activists who express just abject despair about what’s going on…that it’s hard to get up in the morning and do the normal things in life.” (Normal things in life? Like what? Showering? Going to work? Being a ‘human shield’?)

One of the more common complaints of the activists is that non-activists don’t want to hear about their feelings of woe leading them to keep these emotions bottled up until they burst into full-on depression. (This shows how self-absorbed activists can really be: being surprised and getting depressed because non-activists don’t want to hear incessant whining about points of view that they don’t agree with.)
In your comments, please let us know which version you prefer so that we can either incorporate your feedback into future postings or cry about it in therapy. (Now can I have my hug?)

Share this post! These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

This entry was posted on Friday, April 29th, 2005 at 7:07 am by Insider and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.