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 At the center of a powerful storm there is a sensation of sinking. Surrounded by chaos and destruction, there is a false sense of comfort that is soon overcome by the horrors looming in every direction.
Can you feel it? A closing in, a vacuum, an accelerating sense of isolation and in its company frustration, intolerance, fear and abandon. Floods and tornados strike the Midwest from the Texas Panhandle to Minnesota, waves of heat and fires scorch the west, severe weather everywhere, food scarcity, drought, the price of gas…a perpetual rolling sense of gloom.
Can you feel it?
Here in California, as another budgetary crisis tears at public education and essential services, we have had July in April, another in late May and August in June. The high powered jets that used to lay out an artificial cloud cover from morning to night have seemingly given up the cause and waves of heat come bearing down relentlessly like the Hammer of Thor.
Can you feel it?
There is no easing. There is no change. The weather like the wars a half world away press on with indifference like our parasitic leaders in Washington. There is no change. There is only talk of change and the people suffer. It is as if we are stricken with a paralyzing illness, slogging through a daze, marching through the maze, waiting for whatever fate may bring, expecting a new disaster, a new crisis, the next wave of despair to steal what remains of hope and ambition.
At once the futuristic vision of Arthur C. Clarke seems hopelessly naïve as the darkness of Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Aldus Huxley surrounds us with its suffocating gloom.
Can you feel it?
We are in theory a democracy and in a democracy change is supposed to be possible but we have sent new leaders to Washington only to watch them grovel in the muck, engaging the blame game, hiding behind archaic rules of order, protesting helplessness: We cannot end the war. We cannot even begin the process of remaking our economy. We cannot stop the exportation of jobs, the drain on our wages. We cannot mandate clean energy. We cannot affirm the rights of labor at home or abroad. We cannot ease the triple burden of soaring food costs, gas costs and the credit crisis. We cannot stop the foreclosure of homes by the millions. We cannot bring the Guard home. We cannot provide decent affordable health care. We cannot reduce the influence of corporate lobbyists. We cannot hold corporate or government officials accountable for their crimes.
There is no end to what we cannot do so we can only hold our breaths, waiting for the next election when we will try again and watch the cycle of glimmering hope transformed to despair repeating itself ad nauseam.
The sun beats down on another day and all discussions of global climate change were ended with an Academy Award bestowed on the man who might have been president a long time ago. Problem solved.
Civil rights and civil liberties are concepts we use to bludgeon other nations, to justify aggressive wars, but when they are threatened by our own government we fall silent and rely on the most oppressive Supreme Court in contemporary history to uphold the very foundation of western justice (habeas corpus) by the thinnest of margins.
We allow our government and its corporate complicitors to cast aside the Bill of Rights by spying with impunity on its own citizens and watch the representatives we sent to Washington to stop them sign off on the deal without a whimper of protest.
Can you feel it? That dripping sound is our freedom and democracy slipping through our fingers and all we can do is struggle through another day, reaching for another reason to keep faith while the cards keep coming up deuces and the signs are always warnings.
At times like these when every instinct tells us to recoil, fold in, retreat and hunker down for the long haul, it is more important than ever to stand up and fight back.
We can be reasonably confident that we will soon elect the first African American president on a platform of change but we can take little comfort for that is only a symbol – profound, yes, but only a symbol. The most important truth Senator Barack Obama has spoken in this marathon campaign is that change – real change – comes from the bottom up. Like the mythical followers of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, we are paradoxically called upon to define and lead the change that Obama represents.
Obama has spoken of change but we must demand it.
In every town and every city, from Seattle to Miami, from San Diego to Portland, Maine, we must demand a real and binding commitment to clean renewable energies, beginning with solar panels on every public building and proceeding without delay to every private home and structure. Whatever it takes. Knowing that our investment will pay back in a geometric progression, we must demand that our government take every measure now to reduce the consumption of oil and the emission of toxic waste: Cheap and practical mass transit, mandated fuel efficiency, water and wind based energy production, and a vow that coal, oil and nuclear (with its vulnerability and mountains of eternally toxic waste) be used only as a last resort.
We must demand that the corporate crooks that put our economy at risk by gaming the system with unfunded speculation, running up the cost of oil to twice its real market value, be made to pay for their unscrupulous greed. After Enron, the technology, real estate and gas crises, we must demand that the great free market experiment of corporate deregulation is at an end. Corporations are devoid of conscience and that the government must provide.
Recognizing that we have only begun to prepare for an age of natural catastrophes, we must demand that the National Guard come home and that every able bodied man and woman without a job be employed in the business of repairing our neglected infrastructure: Levees, bridges, roads, dams and shelters.
Recognizing that we can no longer afford a war whose only surviving objective – stealing Middle Eastern oil – cannot be achieved even in a hundred years, we must demand that our government bring the occupation of Iraq to an end.
These are only the beginning of the change we must demand but the question remains: How?
I refuse to offer up the hackneyed phrase of every high school forensics speaker or two-bit politician without a clue: Write your representatives. If writing were enough, the change would be in process. If protest were enough, the war would never have begun.
These are hard times and there are no easy solutions. It is my conviction that systemic change can only occur out of desperation (a Great Depression) or when a rising tide of Americans abandon the stranglehold of a hopelessly corrupt two-party system.
It may seem remote and pie-in-the-sky naïve but on the one hand: What is the alternative? On the other, in a very real sense, it has already occurred. The vast majority of Americans do not vote at all. When they awaken or when the nation hits rock bottom, real change will occur. Until then, we will remain in the eye of the storm.
For those diehard patriots who would still take to the streets in protest, the most important protest of our lives will be Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009. |
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