I'm a solutions person, the oldest of seven children, a woman who can't stand things to be disorderly and chaotic. It's not enough to be angry about assassinations. I lived through the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Dr. King. I sat glued to the television for days in November of 1963, battered and angry and terrified. I was 14, I was a good girl who believed in things turning out for the best, somehow. I believed in a loving God who protected those of us who trusted Him. It was a shattering time, and the following years were more body blows, more proofs that evil wins over good without breaking a sweat.
I stopped trusting my government and my leaders at an early age but somehow got through the intervening 47 years without turning to Second Amendment remedies. I don't give a shit about what caused some troubled young man to turn to violence and murder unless there's a solution built into the discourse.
Reading some of the nonsense posted here in the last couple of days was almost worse than the climate of the '60's. I'm a Democrat/liberal/feminist into my bones and I can't tell you how offensive it is to read on a Progressive blog that our Democratic president is responsible for the violence because he's weak, or a corporate tool, or the other RW bullshit memes that pass as truth around here far too often. I'm not sitting idly by while the Heritage Foundation's trolls undermine what's most important in my life.
I don't want a Democratic Sarah Palin in the White House. I don't think it's weak to stand firm on a promise to try to change the political discourse in this benighted country. I'm thrilled to have a president who keeps trying to create change I can believe in by inviting the opposition to rethink what they're doing, knowing full well that they're batshit crazy whenever they lose power and batshit crazier when they get some of it back. I'm baffled by the blindness of the PL and far too many in the blogosphere.
I don't understand the arrogance here - a few moments of reflection will make it pretty clear that if Candidate Obama had followed the advice we gave him we'd be ranting about President McCain and Caribou Barbie dismantling everything we hold dear. Or we'd be living in tents without internet access wondering how things got this bad and we did nothing to stop it.
I understand all the anger about 8 years of Bush/Cheney, I understand the fury about torture and the desire to see these people punished. I don't understand how so many intelligent people can be so clueless about torture and imperialism and a CIA shadow government being the reality of America for decades. Prosecuting Cheney won't clear the stain. He was simply doing what's been done in our name for a very long time. Historically he may turn out to be a simple bumbler with so much arrogance he couldn't keep his vileness hidden as well as his predecessors did. We have a history of undermining governments that leaned left and supporting RW dictators who did shit that make Cheney look like Mary Poppins. Where do you start with the legal proceedings? I doubt anyone knows, but I'd guess that President Obama and Eric Holder have some fairly good ideas about the reality of what this country has really stood for and it's not something that Americans will be able to swallow, not right now.
Ranting and railing and being frustrated about reality won't create change folks. It took 19 years for 11 of the original 13 colonies to ratify the Constitution. It took compromise and moderation and decades to found this country. The idea that compromise and moderation are anathema to liberals makes my head explode. The Social Security program you're fighting to protect was weak tea when it finally passed. The Kossaks of the day were enraged that it left so many people out, that it provided so little for so few. How is it that we don't know that? How is it that we are organizing against a President who has achieved what no other President achieved in a century because what he succeeded in doing was exactly the same weak tea legislation we now revere in Medicare and Social Security? We're supposed to be the smart ones, how is it that we're so easy to manipulate?
Cognitive dissonance doesn't seem to be the intellectual property of the RW. Our loony left screams about the hateful rhetoric of Palin and Angle and Beck, Cantor and Boehner, Kyl and (fill in the blank) while despising Obama for not being a master of hateful rhetoric.
We lived for years being quite happy about the ways Hideous Corporate Overlords made our lives cheaper and easier, and are now enraged that they're successful and rich enough to own our government. The money came from our pockets, folks.
Here's what's real:
We didn't become a new country in 1776, it started decades before that and came into being decades after that. We didn't start fighting for the rights of black people with Brown v Board of Education, it started in the 1800's and is still in process. Homosexuals had to come out of the closet decades ago, have had to live in a physically and emotionally dangerous world for all of those intervening decades, and will not have full rights for decades to come, but DADT repeal was a masterful political move by the corporate Blue Dog who lives in the WH.
Social Security, Medicare, public education, public health, all aspects of our social safety net were weak and didn't help enough people from the day they were finally compromised on and became crucial elements of what America is. And the Republican/Tea Party/Conservative agitators of those individual times fought like maniacs to keep them from coming into being, and continue to fight like maniacs to dismantle them. If you want to keep those programs stop whining and start fighting.
Targeting Blue Dogs didn't improve HCR. We might have had an impact if we'd sent money to the people who wrote and supported excellent bills but we got caught up in the emotion of hating on people who were never going to do it any differently no matter how hard we tried to change them.
Democrats have a reputation for self-destructiveness, and it's becoming clearer to me why this is so. We're so damn rigid we can't handle reality, but we see ourselves through a strange filter of reasonableness and wisdom. We're educated but blind to the truth about our own history. We're politically energized but rendered impotent by our passion for perfection and our subservience to the Twitter mentality.
Do you want to be part of change that matters? Take a deep breath and pull up your big kid panties because I'm about to tell you something you don't want to hear: It. Will. Take. Time.
It takes small steps, things you can't see the benefit of for a long time. Do you want to see an improvement in the media? Start paying for the media that provides more of what you want. We dropped our satellite system 6 months ago, and we told them it's because cable is a vast wasteland controlled by foolish greedy people who forgot that they need people like us in order to succeed. We continue to subscribe to our local paper because they signed up with Politi-Fact and they tell the truth about Rick Perry and Tom DeLay and Sarah Palin. We told them that's the reason we support them.
We are supporters of our local NPR stations because they are far more balanced and provide far more information than anyone else out there. We also tell them that we'd like to see more of the truth, that we want less false equivalency, and we make a point of telling them that in the moment. You can hate on NPR, but they had the reality of the Giffords shooting faster than anyone else did, and they indulged in much less fear-mongering than anyone else did. I found out about the Holder Justice Department prosecuting racist crimes during Katrina on NPR at least a day before it broke here.
We buy groceries at a locally owned store even though it's more expensive and carries fewer of the products we require, which means we also have to go to the very expensive local natural foods store to fill our pantry. We just signed up with a local food co-op which will cut our costs some, but is not wildly convenient - it means ordering two weeks in advance, planning menus one month in advance, and picking up food during a specific time frame one afternoon a month.
We rarely eat out, but when we do it's at locally owned restaurants. I check out the locally owned fabric store before I order on-line or go to the big city. I haven't been in a big box store in 2 years. My local Ace Hardware is a bit more expensive and I sometimes have to ask them to order something for me, but they're local and they pay a decent wage to their very fine employees.
I'm not giving up the internet, so Verizon gets my money. I'm not giving up my cell phone so I swallow my bile and send ATT a check every month because they're the only reliable service in my area. I call Netflix once a month to tell them how much I love the quality of their service, and I send them letters telling them that they'll continue to flourish if they remember that their employees are their most valuable asset. Newscorps gets nothing from me, neither does Sirius. I might just start paying for a NY Times subscription because they're the best of a bad lot, and they may get better with enough liberals supporting them financially while pushing them to the left.
I write to the President regularly, thanking him for being willing to do this lousy job in a lousy environment without giving up on what he told me he intended to do. I sent rather nasty e-mails to many of the Bold Progressives in Congress who were too scared to vote on the Bush tax cuts before the election, but very bold when it came to criticizing the President for negotiating with the party that could actually provide votes once they had what they wanted. I'm off about 30 mailing lists, at my request, because I'm sick of rhetoric and ready to reward action. Alan Grayson talks a great game but I can't quite figure out what he achieved.
When I don't understand what's happening I take the time to sit back and ask questions. Why aren't you prosecuting Cheney? Why haven't you just walked away from Afghanistan? Why don't you bitch-slap Weeping John? Why negotiate with big business? Eventually I find the data that helps me see the larger picture, the repercussions of certain actions, the insanity of fighting the enemy in way that ensures that you become the enemy.
I'm lucky, my father was a brilliant man who bored us all for decades with the true stories of the founding fathers, the evolution of our democracy, the reality of wealth distribution. I learned about the wobblies, the conditions mine workers face, the truth about American foreign policy. I learned about the lizard brain and how evolution has it's drawbacks. I learned the ways the Nazi's used Darwin, and that that kind of shit is alive and well in this country right now.
I learned to confront people who are spouting nonsense even though it makes me sick to my stomach to look some nice little old lady in the eye and say "Oh my goodness, you can't really believe that American corporations are being hurt by high tax rates. They want you to feel sorry for them while they're exporting your grandchildren's jobs because they need your money to get it done."
If you want change you can believe in, start being that change. Take the little steps, do the do things, and soothe the savage beast in you that wants it NOW, because it's that beast that ensures that you get it NEVER.