Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears
While we all sup sorrow with the poor.
Most of us are so hyped up, desperate, and compelled to address the disaster capitalism heaped on us by design, that we have difficulty seeing the suffering around us from more than a political perspective. We are so overwhelmed from eight years of assault on the very basis of our common humanity that we are stuck in perpetual emotions of outrage and obsessive resolve. Most of us are traumatized. Let us slow down to the pace of the heart for a moment to look unflinchingly into the faces of the most important motivation to continue our struggle.
Those of us old enough to have been raised by survivors of the great depression will not have heard many specific stories. My parents and grandparents never said a word about homelessness, growling tummies, and hungry babies. But the way they didn't say it, I knew they had been through something unspeakable, and that they would do anything to avoid being there again. Unfortunately, a willingness to work hard cannot always provide protection against the unholy greed of distant powerbrokers.
They used to tell me
I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead.
Why should I be standing in line
Just waiting for bread?
Dr. John and Odetta
One aspect of this financial mess is not so complicated--the mandate of the government as representative of the least of these. The government is charged with looking out for the welfare of the common citizen. We will tolerate your diamond-wearing, mercedes-driving ways, but your risk and reward is all your own. We want jobs. We want to feed our babies.
I don't want your millions mister
Give me back my job again
Do we even recognize the enemy anymore? Those who are robbing us through taxation without consideration. Through a stacked political process. Through rigged financial policies.
Come, all of you cowboys,
fight for your land.
We do have rights. We have done a lot of discussing, a lot of analyzing, a lot of recording of facts and predicting of results. We have been right a lot. Why have we failed? Because we are up against people who focus their energies on wielding power rather than on being right. To combat them, we have to turn to the one advantage we have, the power of common truth to mobilize the common citizen, the vast pool who are being left out and left behind.
With countries, the same as people,
it's easy to let the best of yourself slip away. - Bruce Springsteen
Now may be our last chance not to let the promise of America slip away.