I have been thinking about it and the whole presidential race has been about foreign policy. the fact is no one wants another president like Bush who will piss off all our allies. At first i thought all that focus was bad, but now, i think it might actually be a good thing.

It seems that what happens in the outside world fixes domestic problems. allow me to explain.

so people involved in movement A are working diligently for their cause, civil rights or what have you. Group A has organizations set up, their lawyers, nice convenient ways for sympathisers to donate funds, all of that. they keep bugging the government to give them an ammendment. Well a war starts. Everyone tells the people of movement A that they shoudl back off, that there are more important thigns to worry about, that picketing a wartime president just hurts your cause. Now the people of movmeent A are aware of the downsides to continuing their work. However, if they lose momentum now they don't know what will happen to their cause. If they back off their are sayign that foreign issues are more important than domestic issues. So group A continues to fight. The war rages on. Slowly all the other groups and movements back off, if it wer eback in the day their volunteers would be off making bandages, or fighting. but grou p A keeps working at it, and suddenly they are the only or one of the few groups vying for the president and media's attention. and they get it. Plain and simple. So they continue and the new attention encourages them to work even harder, suddenly they are fighting even harder than they ever have and they are the only ones doing it. and they wear the government down.

The civil war got the slaves their freedom, mind you it was on eof hte issues of the war but not as primary of one as it is seen in hindsight.

World War 1 gave women the vote, they picketed a war time president with banners that had his own words on them. They were sent to jail for "blocking traffic" sent to jail for nothing. and by the end of the war they had their vote.

Now we are in another war. Putting aside its legitimacy we see another domestic issue coming to a head. as the war gets even mroe complicated people are beginning to push more and more for gay marriage. It looks as though it may come to a head as well

I wonder if it will work again. I am sure that if i di da bit of research i could find more incidents than those in my immediate memory. More things to make me see teh pattern in hsitory that makes me a bit more confident that this will work.

Because even teh supporters are saying, chances are it wont work out. But thinking that makes it less likely to work out.

You know they told the suffragists to wait for individual states rather than a federal ammendment, the same thing they tell homosexuals,