February 7, 2009 archive

In my last essay I proposed the short term fix of the poor, middle class and unemployed helping each other via barter of self-produced goods and services and the use of Freecycle. The long-handled spoons allegory I brought in was particularly apt because it strongly resembles the situation we have today. The handles are so long on our spoons because there is a great deal of mileage and a lot of corporate infrastructure between the stuff on the end of the spoon and our hands. It’s like we’re on the wrong end of a pyramid scheme where we’re paying a hundred people to do something as simple as provide a package of raspberries in the grocery store.

In the summer I wrote about the irony of harvesting a good seven quarts of wild raspberries growing near the railroad tracks close to where I live, while the store down the road was selling the same thing for $4.99 for 4 ounces. The store-bought total value for what I harvested ended up being something around $360.00.

I wrote about how people have become so dependent on thinking that there’s only one way to solve problems – the “acceptable” way, the status quo; that people who lived 15 miles away from midtown Manhattan spent the night sleeping on the sidewalk during the northeastern blackout of August 2005 rather than simply… walk home.

It would have taken the average person about five hours to walk those 15 miles. They could have walked along the railroad tracks – the trains certainly weren’t running. They could have slept in their own beds that night. But no… they slept in their clothes on the sidewalk. Because that’s what everybody else was doing. Because they’ve become so dependent on the idea that they couldn’t get home without a car, a bus or a train that they didn’t even THINK to walk. They’ve become fixated on the idea that because it takes them an hour to get into the city during rush hour, they surely live more than fifteen miles away from it. To cite the Dead Kennedys album title, “Give Me Convenience Or Give Me Death”.

To save our economy and our nation, we need people willing to think outside the box.

The problem is, we have an awful lot of people who do NOT want us to do that. Because the box is of their making, and they’re very proud of it.

I spent some time the other night listening to the clip of FDR’s first broadcast to the nation that Edger posted in Pluto’s essay on the subject, and while I recognized many a good intention and wise goal in FDR’s plan, I also caught a sentence here and there that got my inner cynic smirking; and furthermore I recognized that there were some interesting peripheral things going on both before and after this speech was made.

I recognized a pattern, a formula. It’s a bad scene that’s going to see some daylight here and now, because we’re being set up to be shoved into that box again and we need to stop the madness.

News Flash! The last 50 years of Culture War has polarized the United States.

To the truly absurd point where the two sides of this polarization have come to the point of literally having their own facts. Each side takes any and all new information and pushes it through the sausage grinder of their own political and cultural leans and viewpoint. What emerges, unsurprisingly, is one ‘fact’ interpreted two different, exactly opposite, ways. Each side then uses this ‘fact’ to bolster it’s own viewpoint. If you can’t agree on the facts, and we can’t, if you can’t agree on what is true, and we can’t, you can never achieve a consensus.

If you can’t reach a consensus, all you can reach is a half baked ‘agreement’ that nobody likes. Since nobody likes it it probably won’t work. Since no one likes it, both sides will attack it….and the divide continues, as both sides blame each other for ‘it’ not working.

Obama, the poor fool, is trying to heal this divide. Despite the fact that the divide has grown so wide that most of the participants that are on the firing line, the media, pundits, politicians…and bloggers are so immersed in the process and so entrenched in their positions that they haven lost the ability to think in any other terms.

Including me. Because, hey, The Republicans are after all lying shit stains who will lie cheat steal torture and kill to advance their power and agenda of hate. So….when any concession or compromise occurs…It pisses me off to no end. I hate it. And I condemn who ever did it. Bastards.

Obama is trying to end that, end it enough at least, to achieve some sort, any sort of national consensus. He is not trying, ultimately, to achieve political bi-partisanship to achieve the change he envisions. He is trying to achieve enough of a consensus, enough bi-partisanship among citizens to allow him to change the way that politics works in the US. That means rejecting ALL ideologies and sides and producing a series of minor changes that eventually translate into weakening both ‘sides’ and building the middle….the only place that consensus can occur.

To do that…..he has to piss everybody off.

It is working!

No matter what he does, both sides will play out their part in the partisan play. Both sides will use the same tactics that they have been using for so very, very long. The only advantage he has is that everything sucks SO bad that it is obvious that the way we have been doing things doesn’t work. If he can prove to the ‘middle’ that he can make things work even marginally better, the middle will untie to defeat both sides….and THAT will be the Change.

That will take time. Time to produce results….and time for both sides to ‘recover’ from the extreme bloodletting on both sides that The Republicans thrive on and the Democrats suck at to calm down a bit.

Which sux, because dammit we are right! Even though being right hasn’t gotten us jack shit for a very long time. They are wrong and we are right. our facts prove that. But until we can regain enough of a national consensus to once again agree on what even the word fact actually means, we will never win.

As usual, Obama is fighting the bigger war, while we wrangle over the small ones. As we must. His ultimate goal is VERY large. I hope he wins. But until he does, I will keep fighting those lying assholes.

And keep trying not to hate him for cooperating with them, as he tries his best to destroy the power of both the Left and the Right and build a national consensus more powerful than both…that actually makes our government work.

Damn, being a grownup is hard!

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

This may be my final, daily essay on this topic. This is my essay for Sunday, February 8, 2009, but I’m putting it up now.

This essay is about reason number 2,781 for signing this petition and for emailing Attorney General Holder at Whitehouse.gov or  at [email protected] to ask the Attorney General to reconsider whether prosecutors should seek the death penalty in the pending 49 50 51 federal death penalty cases, and when he determines that these cases are not appropriate for that extremely barbaric, horrific, inhuman penalty (no cases in actuality are ever appropriate for the death penalty), to direct prosecutors not to seek the death penalty.  

I don’t know about any of you, but I’m finding myself exhausted. Its only been about 2 1/2 weeks with this new administration, but I feel like my pace of trying to keep up with things has been pretty frenetic. I’m trying very hard to read, listen and collect my thoughts about what I think is happening. And between a hyped-up media and a progressive blogoshpere that is analyzing every move anyone in DC makes, its an awful lot to absorb.

That’s why this morning, I felt a need to go back and read An Open Letter to Barack Obama that was written by Alice Walker the day after the election. I remember that it moved me greatly and I thought it was wonderful advice that she gave. Its just that now, maybe I need it too.