Give us this day our dailyKos and we feel alive. Connected to each other. Faceless names with fearless thoughts. We inhale the clever comments. We exhale our rants. We breathe in the news of the day and receive sustenance in the form of recommendeds. It's a brave, new, world we hang out in. But, unless we break through this blogoshpere bubble, the old world as we know it, will be gone.
At no time in our history has this country been so close to tearing apart the fabric upon which it is based. The assault on our democracy by those in power has been nothing short of breathtaking. The list of Bush&Co. transgressions is long: going to war on false pretenses; trampling the first amendment; lying to congress to pass medicare legislation; illegally outing a CIA agent for revenge; creating fake news using fake reporters; stealing from the poor to give to the rich; falsifying EPA reports; instituting a culture of torture; defying the separation of church and state; ignoring international treaties to which the U.S. is a party; and most recently in the Schiavo debacle, showing that we have truly become a "nation of men, not laws." And this is not even a list complete!
Yet in the face of this, we do not rise up. We are not hunkered down on the steps of the Capitol refusing to disperse until our soldiers are brought home from an unjust war. We do not rally ourselves to protest the disgusting use of torture in our name and the installation of its chief architect as the highest legal official in the land. We, for whom "government by the people" has been a way of life for over 200 years, have failed miserably to live up to our heritage. Around the world we see "people power" being used to bring down corrupt governments in places that have not even known democracy. Are we not shamed by their example? We should be.
But the more important question is: why? Why have we not responded to the corruption in our own government the way our friends across the globe have done? Is it simply complacency? The more thinking I have done about it, the more I have come to believe that the blogosphere is no small part of the problem. It is in this "world" that we give voice to our frustrations and seek solace from our compatriots and hope to spread the word. But by writing and responding to each other in this virtual community, what we have done is created the false sense of security that we are actually doing something to activate change. We are not! We need to be on the streets. We need to stop preaching to the choir. We need to reach outside this little bubble we've created for ourselves and talk to the people on the other side, or on no side. "People power" will not come from mere words in a virtual world; it will take real bodies in real places.
Don't get me wrong - I love the blogoshpere. It was my salvation, as I'm sure it was for many others, during the aftermath of the so-called election. It's just that I think it has created a problem we did not foresee. How many of us would be doing other things to combat this administration if the blogoshpere didn`t exist? How many of us are willing to do other things now? It is time to turn our collective creativity toward the real world and away from the virtual one. Ideas, anyone?