Well, It’s been about seven years since my last entry here. Funny how some things change and others don’t. I don’t mean to say I haven’t been around, I have, as a reader, petition signer, e-mail writer, marcher, voter. I just decided to lay down my pen and board up my key board.
Fought hard battles and lost in ‘00 and ‘04. Fought harder (if sometimes reluctantly) to see our side win with a candidate in ‘08 that I felt, at key moments, didn’t defend our core principles, but felt such RELIEF at the victory. But then came the Congressional bloodbath of 2010 and The Fear crept in, and in ‘12 we learned it was gonna be hard enough to just try to hold on to what we’d won and, gripped in that Fear, we lost everything in ‘16.
Now it's all about trying to come to grips with some history. The 16 and 1/2 years of the New Millennium are lost, desert a wasteland of broken dreams.
But I'm back. I woke up today with a thought buzzing in my head. A feeling in my gut. It took me a few cups of strong tea to put my finger on either. They almost blew away into the inferno of our national political discourse, but then:
That feeling: Hope. And that thought: I'm ready for this, whatever it is that’s coming, I’ve been preparing for it my whole life.
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I witnessed my mother’s struggle (a single working professional raising 3 kids) to succeed in 'a man's world' while trying to break the 'boy's club for what it was: oppression. One of my Uncles was a history teacher who, when I’d visit him in the summer, would take me on tours of Revolutionary Memorials and Historic sites. From him I learned the passion of Patrick Henry, the Thoughtful correspondence of Adams & Washginton, the Romance of Poe, having committed large sections of each’s most famous works to memory (I’m a ton a fun at parties, ask me sometime!), and the tragedy of Thomas Jefferson..
That thirst for knowledge, the fire for what was Right and True and Just led me to seek out the words of Kennedy and King and Malcolm X, of Hemmingway and ee cummings and Frost, eventually it took me to Boston where I studied life, history, art, love, politics (and Communications — with a BSc in Television and Film).
I lived a bohemian life in the city in 1990s, back during a time when people like me were wearing flannel and baggy jeans as a political statement about how discontent we were with our suburban wealth. I simmered as I watched the ‘Right Wing Conspiracy’ rise at FoxNews, watch as it digged it’s claws in and tried to tear down a President. I paid attention and noted the change in tone that began in about 1997 when the Conservative right stopped carrying about facts (people today act as if Fake News is new, no, it’s just been perfected)…
THAT THAT ALL ENDS NOW.
You might be asking, “Why you mad ‘Bro?” I ain’t mad. I’m just done listening to their alternative facts. Hell, we have the greatest revolutionary mind in history on our side in Henry David Thoreau:
“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”
There are many Patriots around us, many true hearts upon which to rest when we are weary. But we must fight. We must make our voices heard. We must use our collective weight to clog the machine of government until it breaks or yields to us.
My self imposed silence here is over.
I will resist! I am in revolt!
“When the subject has refused allegiance and the officer has resigned his Office, the Revolution is accomplished.”
