Tonight my daughter and I drove down a street in our town where a small bog has developed on a rare patch of spare land. The weather is warm -- the first warm day in two weeks -- and the bog is alive with the sounds of crickets, and frogs, and other creatures of the night.
We roll down the windows and slow to a crawl, my eyes peeled to the rear view mirror. We'll move when a vehicle approaches from behind. In the meantime, we soak in the sound. "Listen," I tell her. "Listen and memorize it. I'm so afraid you're going to be trying to explain this sound to your children and your grandchildren."
My daughter doesn't say a word. She just listens. To the sounds, I hope. She is tired of listening to me -- I have become the voice of sadness, and of loss, and of fear. I can keep the tears from coming if I make light. "Well, you have those CDs," I say to my daughter. "You know, the ones with the night sounds, and the one with the dolphins."
"Yeah, I still have those, Mom, don't worry," she says.
Car lights reflect off the mirror and I press the gas pedal, and we drive away from the sounds in the bog. The tears form pools in my eyes and I feel like my heart is going to break.
I can remember a time when I wasn't so damn hopeless and histrionic. I didn't used to drive around rolling the windows down and swooning over frogs croaking in the night. But I am scared shitless and growing more hopeless by the day. The smartest people on the planet are being ignored and ridiculed while crap governments continue to abuse, swindle, and pollute like there's no tomorrow.
Today is Earth Day. I haven't slept all night. I've been awake through the entire day before Earth Day, and into Earth Day now, and I can't seem to sleep. I'm exhausted, but not ready to sleep. I check dKos, I go to google. Google's Earth Day image shocks me: a graphic of melting ice caps.
<center>
</center>
Only two years ago, it was an image of an oak tree, a squirrel, and a bird.
I watched the film "Bobby" tonight. In the movie, there's a segment -- from a campaign commercial or a program, I'm not sure -- with Kennedy talking to school children about how much we pollute and what we need to do immediately to stop it. That was 1968. Today, we have an administration that silences scientists, has corporate friends who pay propagandists to deny global warming, and refuses to take any role in reducing emissions of any kind. No, it has friends in the "friendly coal" industry, and the big SUV industry, and the oil industry, and ...
I read other diaries on dKos. Like Maccabee's recap of Frank Rich.
What’s being lost in the Beltway uproar is the extent to which the lying, cronyism and arrogance showcased by the current scandals are of a piece with the lying, cronyism and arrogance that led to all the military funerals that Mr. Bush dares not attend. Having slept through the fraudulent selling of the war, Washington is still having trouble confronting the big picture of the Bush White House. Its dense web of deceit is the deliberate product of its amoral culture, not a haphazard potpourri of individual blunders.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
"Its amoral culture." Amen. On Earth Day and every other day, we have an administration that is entirely criminal and lethal to the people it purports to govern. It is not a government of mistakes and blunders. It is a government of crooks and creeps, entirely staffed by authoritarians, criminals, propagandists, and shills entirely financed by our tax dollars.
The voices we respect the most -- Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Bill Moyers -- are trying to say it. Why can't any of our elected representatives say it? For chrissakes, they're in Washington, they see it, they know what is going on, and it's time to say it.
What would happen? A meltdown of government? Pardon me, but we've already got that. What, New Orleans would still be a mess, the war would drone on, our kids would be abused with NCLB, our food would be tainted? We're already there, kids. You say our elections would be screwed with, our tax money would support charlatans, our rights of habeus corpus, free speech, and free assembly would be curtailed? They been there and done that. We'd be a nation in a state of civil emergency, a country entirely bankrupt and confused, citizens spied on and oppressed? That is our daily bread.
I can't take much more. I gave as much money to good candidates as a single mom can, and I've helped fund moveon commercials, and "Iraq For Sale," and god knows what else and I'm drained and broke. I need to buy CFLs and solar panels, and an acre of land to grow food on ... I need to do something besides worry and cry and drive slowly past bogs.
Almost everything I am doing is useless. I call my representative's office: "please hold Bush to a timetable for withdrawal." They take my name, my address. They'll use my money to send me a dumb letter. Printed on paper they chopped down a tree to produce, all so they could blow smoke up my ass on official stationery.
My city is not doing anything right (build more shit, destroy more wetlands, support more polluters, encourage factory farms, elect faith-based politicians), my state isn't doing anything right (it's Indiana -- say no more), and the federal government isn't doing anything right. NOT ONE THING RIGHT. That is huge, that is monumental, it is obscene. NOT ONE THING RIGHT. And a great, great many things that are wrong, wrong, wrong.
And where would one turn for redress? The highest court in the land? Now a joke. U.S. attorneys? All bought and paid for by Bushco.
I have no idea what this administration thinks the end game is. More and more, I believe they either envision a world with a much smaller population of like-minded folks, or are nihilists to a degree heretofore unfathomable. If you want the earth to survive, and most of its peoples to prosper, you do not behave this way. However, if you believe in survival of the fittest (even while masquerading as a Jesus-loving faith-based politician), you grab the goodies for yourself and your tribe and tell the rest to go screw themselves. That's where we are at, I think. Corporations are now buying up water sources and all the arable land, and telling poor people in third world countries they cannot store seed or collect water in rain barrels (Bechtel tried to pull that one on Bolivians) -- are you kidding me?
Yes, sure, I try to stay focused. Maybe if we elect more Democrats, maybe if we give more money (the money, frankly, is a big part of what's wrong with our terrible system of government and if we don't fix it soon it will destroy us).
The truth is, I never drive by that bog and think about RaceTracker or who's running in District Whatever. I think about how far we've come that this is our response to wholesale catastrophe. The world is going to hell, and Mall of America wants taxpayer subsidies so it can expand. Obviously, in the scorched and starving future, there will be a need for some more stores and another skating rink.
Each of us struggles with the question: what can I do? Some days I want to run for office, some days I want to go to my own Walden Pond, some days I want to light myself on fire on the capitol steps to make somebody goddamn listen (that would be worth three and a half minutes in the MSM schedule -- it would be four, but I am neither blonde nor young, nor have I ever worked in Hollywood). None of it seems the least bit helpful.
Is this because we will not name the beast? The beast is our own government. Not just one person, not just one policy, but the whole reeking thing, top to bottom. Scandal after scandal, story after story, hearing after hearing -- no one thing is going to do it, because it's the biggest, worst mess this country (and the world) has ever seen. A country so corrupted, misguided, and weaponized that we have lost every friend we ever had.
I'm so tired. So utterly tired. Six years of tired. No, 50 years. Government has been mediocre at best my entire life, and corporations own my life. Reagan made me ill, and Bush I did, too, and there have been very few bright spots. I work to pay my bills and buy life insurance so my kids can carry on the cycle of work and death.
I told my daughter we should take a tape recorder out to that bog. We should record those sounds. It's Earth Day and that's what I'll celebrate: that maybe I have some time left to do that.