This site is built on a love of progressive politics. We are called upon by Kos to elect more and better Democrats, and we all agree with that simple aim, but what we really love, though, are the political campaigns themselves. Most of us work in them, volunteer for them, and we follow them as though our very lives depended upon them. We care. A lot.
Political campaigns are like cocoons. Especially when we are young, we wrap ourselves in them as though they are more important than life itself. We do this because we have strong principles and beliefs. We also do this because it feels really, really good to matter, and we in our cocoons are absolutely sure that we matter a lot.
Many of us become utterly consumed by campaigns. They feel good in the same way drugs can feel good - but, only at first. If we use campaigns to define ourselves, we run a real risk of becoming actual junkies with no lives outside of politics. We forget what real life actually is. We build and inhabit cocoons like addicts do.
In our cocoons, all tiny decisions are life and death; all extraneous events are drastically important and all decisions worries are bigger than the diameter of the sun. Everything we do is magnified and everything we feel is right on the surface of our skin. Everything feels hyper-real, but actually we are limited by the cocoon from having a reality-based perception of the world.
Does any of this ring a bell? It should. Despite the fact that we are between campaigns for President, many of us have had a hard time breaking out of the cocoon from the last campaign. We live and die on a daily basis with each decision. each comment. This isn't healthy for anyone, and it has gotten a lot of people here seriously off track.
Regardless of whether you believe the President is doing great work, or if you think he's an abject failure, there is one thing that is clearly true. The President is not in a cocoon. He's in real life up to his eyeballs and he has no option to retreat into campaign mode - into a cocoon. He has to deal with the real world as it exists for him. We need to do the same.
The BP oil spill is real life and it is happening to real people in real time. The President, in his own way and on his own schedule is dealing with the challenges of it. He is not campaigning. He is working. We shouldn't expect him to cater to every wish we have, not to every perceived new crisis of confidence.
We should not be reacting as though we were in the middle of the great BP Oil Spill Political Campaign. We are not. Rather than fighting with each other about the relative merits of the President's speech, we should be looking for things we can do together to mitigate the disaster at hand.
Let's break out of the cocoon and actually do something real. Here are some links to sites where you can volunteer to clean up the spill:
Louisiana.
Florida.
Greenpeace.
More volunteer sites.