Opening my Yahoo! e-mail today, I found perhaps 20 fiery e-mails from my family about U.S. politics. So I sent back the following. Hopefully, it will explain some of my views to people who read this blog:

If I may say a few words...

I adore America. I am proud of it, of us. No country has been more innovative.  Take the 20th century. Film and other culture, technology, civil rights, social law….. No other country had close to as much impact on the world. I'm proud of our grandparents for being part of it and helping to build it.

Revolution would be a terrible idea. Democracy is better. We have the power now to vote any government into office we please. I think any political system that calls for force instead of (free, fair) election is wrong. And revolution additionally is unfair to the more vulnerable elements of a society: No one suffers worse from a seized government than the poor, the handicapped, the elderly, those with countercultural ideas.

The U.S.'s innovation in the world arose from our well-designed Constitution, the liberties we have in it and our postcolonial population of people who wanted to do this thing called "the American dream."
 
Socialism is a powerful force, but capitalism is equally so. I would blend the two, which is what the U.S. has been doing for a long time: Social Security, workplace safety, the FDA. But any change must be economicallycompetitive on a world scale, or you will see our standard of life drastically decrease, in which case we will be shouting, "Viva the fresh water supply, viva the jobs we don't have because industry moved overseas, viva the old crime rate before people couldn’t feed themselves anymore." However, I think very good social ideas can be quite economically competitive with enough thoughtful structure.
 
Also, the '60s generation did an awful lot for our country. I'd like to start with the bus boycotts and MLK and note that the decade began in a highly conservative, John Birch Society, repressed, segregated and lynching, foreign war-mongering way and ended up stoking an imaginative "counterculture" that persists to this day. I'm not sure what any baby boomers have done to you recently to get you all worked up -- I find them generally nice.
 
--E.