Today, I want to speak to you of pain.
I want to speak to you of loneliness, and sorrow, and the bitter anger from being trapped in an uncontrollable nightmare.
I want to teach you of the joy that comes of despair, and the special kind of hope that can only come when all hope has died.
Mostly, I want to blame Hunter, MsOC, and, God help me, John Kerry for making me do this.
Find out what the hell I'm talking about below the fold.
My wife and I were talking about the Halliburton camp contract while driving around running errands - paying bills, seeing if we have enough money to take our daughter to Disneyland, getting a new cell phone, all things that I thought as a child that I'd wind up eating the barrel of a shotgun before I ever had the opportunity to do - and, when I told her of the contract, and how it was only for "immigration emergencies", she got a look of horror on her beautiful face and said, "This is it. They're going to round people up. Somebody needs to do something."
I had to pull the car over. I told her, "Don't you get it? There is no somebody."
I Am Selfish, I Am Wrong
Look, when people asked me why I use Moody Loner I usually give them the flip answer - "Guess what my childhood was like?"
Today, Gentle Reader, you're getting the long answer.
Part of the long answer lies with a little friend of mine called Hereditary Multiple Exotosis. You'll need to scroll down, it's number four. Not as dramatic as asthma or any one of a hundred childhood afflictions that keeps parents awake at night, but it comes with its own attendant ramifications - as the bone tumours grow, they push the joints out of alignment, twisting the limbs and back - did you know that much of the human body's ability to walk, lift, and move comes from leverage? Because I certainly do.
So, I'm small, and I'm weak. Weight training, martial arts, high protein diets - they couldn't change what was in my very bones. And it hurts, too - a constant, low-level pain that has been my constant companion from my first serious growth spurt and will be with me until the day I die.
No, I don't want to start the pity party - God, there are kids growing up with cancer for Christ's sake. But I know what it's like to be the small one, the weak one, the powerless one - and when you add in the grade-school playyard, a neoconservative's lassez-faire dream wherein the strong and wealthy work their will upon the poor and weak.
That leads into the second part. Anyone who remembers their public-school education knows what happens to someone that's too small and weak to defend themselves. Add in that they're bright - but not bright enough to hide it - and you have Most Likely to Perpetrate a Shooting Incident material.
Not to say that I'm Quasimodo. You'd have to be a careful observer to notice anything wrong with me, but I don't wear shorts and I don't like crowds. I'm no deranged loner with a firearm, either, but in some ways it would be easier if I were. It was easy, in a way, when it was just me, when I didn't have a lovely wife and a beautiful daughter, when I didn't have the Fear.
Just Say You Never Met Me
So, yeah, when November 2000 rolled around and we had the Whit Congressionial Staffers' Riot my first reaction was fascism. I, too, waited for the mythical Somebody - the Somebody with more clout, more time, more money, more activism to do Something.
I watched the largest anti-war protests ever be ignored, as the strong and wealthy have always ignored the protests of the weak and powerless, and I came to the realization that I've been here before, that my life had come full circle and the same darness I'd grown up with, that I'd spent my life putting behind me, was waiting for me in Bush's let's-throw-him-in-the-trash-can-and-roll-it-down-the-hill smirk and Cheney's for-the-good-of-the-company-you-need-to-starve snarl.
There Ain't No Easy Way Out
So this is all well and good, Moody - you may be saying to yourself - but what was all that darkness crap above the fold?
You don't understand - all my life has been a struggle, against the bureaucrat, the entitled, those who make my life and the lives of my wife and daughter just as impossible as they can, solely because they can.
And here's the point - they always win. My entire life is just on the edge of the catastrophe curve. It's like Apollo 13, where there's a disaster, and they jury-rig a fix to the disaster just as the next one shows up, and failure is not an option.
Failure is not an option, and every day has its failures, and the struggle is to keep any of the failures from escalating to homelessness and starvation.
It took me some time to realize that, to a greater or lesser extent, that is life for ninety percent of us. We're the ones who have to sit down with a table full of bills and decide which ones get paid, the daily triage to keep it going - and above all, we have to keep the struggle from the children, to keep them happy and innocent, to keep the worry and fear from carving their bones the way they've carved mine.
There is no hope.
Bush's "base" owns the media. They bought the Republican Party outright. They embrace their extremists - leftist extremists are shunned and ridiculed, and rightly so while the Right's extremists - Coulter, Malkin, Limbaugh, Savage, and the rest of the eliminationists are given TV and radio time to spew their hate into those of us that Fear.
And too many, all too many of us buy it. It's easier to find someone weaker, someone more powerless, and take the rage and frustration and hate and fear out on them then it is to keep fighting. After all, if all you hear is that God wants to save you, but those damned liberals with their science and freedom of religion and Bill of Rights and their freedom and justice for all won't let Him, and looking at that table full of bills and feeling the Fear in your belly, it would be easy, only too easy to give in.
And that's where the face of the Enemy comes from.
I Swear I Knew It All Along
So here we are, in the home stretch - the "So, what do we do about it?" part.
Guess what? I don't know what to do about it.
I'm not here because of my great love for the Democratic Party. Until recently, I thought the Democratic Party was part of the problem.
I'm here for help. I'm here for allies. I'm here because I can't fight them by myself anymore - that whether this winds up in the ballot box or in the streets, government of, by, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.
Yes, it's that important. The Republicans keep telling you that they want one-party rule in America forever. What do you suppose that means? When will you take them seriously?
Look, next to Hunter and some of the other writers here, I can barely string words together. They're not going to be talking about this post in Time, I'm not going to be refusing interview requests from right-wing radio hosts. But, just by showing how big this tent can be, if I can get one lurker to call or write their Senators and Representative, to donate to a candidate, to volunteer as a poll observer, to do Something, then my time and yours has not been wasted. My wife - as apolitical as I am, I'm Johnny Firebrand next to her - is ready to fight, and my daughter will not grow up in a police state, will not grow up thinking this is normal. At the end, there is hope.
I'll close this with a banned word - a word that can get you fired, that can make you unemployable, but one I won't let them take from me.
Peace.