Setting A Positive Agenda

So I've been taking some flak from people on the post on the use of the military that I posted yesterday. And perhaps for good reason--my ideas on it may be half baked. Only one complaint to my detractors--post your criticisms on the blog damnit!!!

But seriously, though there are certainly legitimate criticisms of my ideas on a Democratic agenda for the military, I do think it's important that we on the left work harder to promote a positive agenda. Too often our actions, whether talking amongst friends, on our blogs, in the newspapers, or on the radio are simply negative. The best example of this is Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, who criticizes the US for not doing anything about the Sudan, but if we did do something would undoubtedly criticize it as well.

It's very easy to complain about how bad things are and I think we should. But I also think that it's very important that we work on presenting an alternative vision of a future society as opposed to only criticizing the one we now have. We have all kinds of critiques of everything that is wrong today but very little in the way of concrete alternatives. I suppose this is because it's easy to find allies in criticism than in positive ideas--I think all of the readers of this think Iraq was a stupid war but everyone probably has a different idea of what we should do now or what we should do to fight terrorism, etc. And of course these different ideas are fine--we would be braindead if we didn't discuss different alternatives. But I don't think we do this enough and I hope that this blog plays a tiny role in alleviating this problem.