I'm sitting here listening to CNN, with the talking heads "debating" whether the round-up of the Miami Seven was as big a deal as BushCo says or if it was timed to take attention away from the news about SWIFT.
Ignoring the spin - and I consider both these angles verbal sleight-of-hand to obscure more fundamental issues - I keep falling into a dream state, trying to imagine an earlier time, another place where the underclass began to roil with discontent.
In 1381, an English peasant named Wat Tyler led what has been dubbed the "Peasants Revolution" against the regents governing in the name of under-age Richard II. Tyler was a war vet, having fought in some of the battles of the 100 Year War between England and France. The peasants were being ground down by these foreign expeditions, and taxes that kept falling disproportionately on them.
No shock to learn that the rebellion failed when Tyler was killed while in a parley with the boy king. All the charters the citizenry had won from the king were revoked, and all the other ringleaders were hanged.
British history is littered with examples like this - Jack Cade in 1450 and Guy Fawkes in 1605 to name two.
So, 625 years later, seven poor, undereducated, minority men enter into a plot to attack their own government.
The attorney general holds a press conference following their arrests, and says that while they had no money, no training and no equipment, their anger and hatred were real. And he warns that home-grown terrorism such as this is a growing threat.
Is there any point at which this administration takes a good, hard look at itself to see how its own policies and actions (or inactions) are creating this anger? Is there anything at all that could awaken them to the possibility that individuals in dispair are trying to fight back? That the government is reaping the bitter results of years of neglect (Katrina), arrogance (Iraq), mendacity (WMD, Valerie Plame) stupidity (Michael Brown), and avarice (national debt, CEO salaries, public graft, oil industry prices), and so on ad nauseum?
I cannot answer that question.
But I have always believed in the long, grindingly slow progress of humanity. Living in the shadows cast by this gruesome cabal, I keep reminding myself that while we can only be responsible for our own actions in our own time, we are part of a millennia-long tapestry. It will be our centuries-distant descendents who will be able to see more clearly what our particular snapshot in time signified.
Cold comfort indeed for those of us trapped in this time, but darkness always passes. The morning does come.