Are you tired of being owned? It's not hard to find areas of our lives where our autonomy has been seized, insulted, dismissed, and ground into the dirt.
Your locked - wiretapped? - mobile.
Your locked-down, DRM'd media.
Your local broadband monopoly.
Your student loans
Your personal privacy - collected, collated, tabulated and sold in bulk.
Your food safety.
Your rationed health care, where a major illness or injury can bankrupt you with scary speed.
Your security theater
Your pharmaceutical prices.
All of this leaves any sane person feeling like a domesticated farm animal, milked for cash value at every turn, then discarded when productivity ceases.
Then there's housing. I've been a renter most of my life. Renting has it's pitfalls and advantages - it's simple, low maintenance, you have a variety of choices when deciding where to live, and - depending on the disposition of your lease - moving is relatively painless.
On the other hand, you have to put up with the landlord's rules and regulations, the rent can be jacked up, and there's that annoying leash lease.
I've considered home ownership now and then, with its myriad benefits, and my brother, after he bought a house, was quick to tout those benefits.
But the idea always left me uneasy, and eventually I admitted I knew why - I simply don't like the idea of being owned. For as any homeowner with a mortgage can tell you, the house owns you as much as you own it - perhaps more.
Sure, you own the house - you and your banker. The interest you pay your banker in a typical mortgage will exceed the value of the purchase price. And as many homeowners are learning now - the hard way - when the housing market goes south, selling may not even be an option. If you got in with an ARM and discover the payments are ballooning beyond your means, it's even uglier.
Even when the mortgage is paid, you don't really own the land your home sits on - you merely lease it from Uncle Sam. Neglect your lease payment property taxes, and you quickly find you don't really own your property after all.
Well, ok - we accept property taxes in exchange for the services received - public education, national defense, local police, roads and maintenance, etc. But our payments are not optional, and payment is unrelated to the quality of those services. (Don't even get me started on homeowners associations)
I need not belabor the point that the quality of service has declined - see your daily headlines and newscasts. The relationship between taxpayers and government services has become lopsided to the point that individual taxpayers are, simply, owned.
Most of time our attention is focused on the demands of daily living, enough so that our sense of being owned - and we do sense it - is repressed. We shrug it off as the way things are and go about our business.
But every now and then something rises up to remind you of your peasant status and the seething resentment resurfaces.
Those of us gathered here at Daily Kos are more sharply aware of this reality than most. We apprehend the stunning depth and scope of corruption in the commercial and political spheres. We keenly recognize the damage done to the nation over the past 6 1/2 years and how much work it will take to heal it.
But the quiet rage at being owned is reflected in the polls. The strength of that collective fury is growing. It is not limited to the denizens of DK. It's everywhere, red and blue states alike.
It needs a focus, one aimed with precision at the ballot box. And the question every voter should be asking themselves when they go to vote is - do you want to be owned?
No? Imagine that. Well, then, if you don't want to be owned, who ya gonna call?
Progressives.
Who's gonna end the war in Iraq?
Progressives.
Who's gonna fight for universal health care?
Progressives.
Who's going to replace cronyism with science at the NOAA, NASA, FEMA, DOE?
Progressives
Who will deliver an attorney general with integrity?
Progessives
Who really understands the value of privacy?
Progressives.
Who gets what civil rights are all about?
Progressives.
Tell your conservative voting friends, if they're tired of being ignored, discounted, shoved around and OWNED, the path to freedom is clear - walk with progressives.
P.S. Democratic officeholders - don't assume your seats are now safe because Dems are now favored. There are Dems and there are progressive Dems - and voters with the wisdom to know the difference.