Day 1003: Coming Down For Air

Newsgator says I’ve skimmed only 1,034 posts and that there are 1,635 posts to peruse before I’m all caught up with two to three weeks’ worth of your blog posts. Guess the Arts & Letters Daily and Jezebel feeds will have to be purged unread in the name of Feedreader Zero. The sad sacrifices of the internerd. Don’t weep quietly, just send cash.

Suspect Device, Virgotex and First Draft have the political butt-kicking covered and with appropriate vigor, which helps during these moments in 2008 CE when a politician opens his or her mouth and I develop a rash and/or a nicotine-fit-esque urge to use this space to tell them to shut their self-serving mouths and go frak themselves but a computer or internet connection is not available and, even if it were, who wants to read a bunch of asterisked-out expletives wrought of travel hypnosis? Besides, who really wants to read anything but Virgotex’s thought-provoking latest, which reminds me that even my fatigued questioning and fist-shaking at those who pretend to shepherd America and their sheep is better than not caring at all, right now?

… We“ve been deliberately and painstakingly conditioned to be cynical and dispirited and complacent. No one in this administration gives a rat“s ass that Bush stumbles and slurs and tap dances his way through another press conference, that every speech and interview is just a succession of nervous tics and malapropisms. They don’t care any more than anyone cared when your principal would stammer through the morning announcements over the school intercom. No one in this administration wants us to be inspired. If they want anything from us, it’s our disinterest.

… There are plenty of us, including Clinton voters and for that matter, Republicans and Independents, who are weary and beat down and ready for change. The thing is, people want the change to be quantifiable and recognizable, they want to know what they are getting into before they jump. They want their change to look familiar and welcoming, and above all, safe. And if possible, easy.

The thing is, we are miles past that being able to happen. We are so far past safe and easy that it would take the light from safe and easy decades and decades to reach us. Taking our country back is not going to be safe and it certainly isn’t going to be easy and it’s going to take a long time.

Let’s talk about change. As an example, this weekend, I watched a CNN snippet on rising oil prices and could swear it was the same segment from last summer and the summer before that and so on, only with the price of oil higher. Every summer, we have the same freakout party we had the previous year, yet I haven’t seen a marked drop in the number of low-efficiency vehicles out on the roads. Even in Madison, WI, which oozes EnviroGreenOrganic out of every pore, there are as many single-driver gas guzzlers per capita as in, say, Dallas, Houston or New Orleans. Granted that Madison has more bike paths than all fifty states put together and those bike paths are very well-utilized, but the point I make here is that either Americans aren’t too concerned with the high price of oil or they are but aren’t going to change their current habits because change is scary and hard and its results are not already known.

Again, I’m not talking simply of lifestyle changes because Oh My God The Sky Is Falling And Polar Bears Are On The Off The On The Endangered List, Let’s Debate, but also the kind in which we stop being assholes to one another and make peace with the fact that we’re all here to stay, so get over it. It’s easy to write off change as a basic human impediment, but that’s a cop-out. What puzzles me about older people, normally the most conservative of voters, is they are the ones who should know that life is nothing but change. Look at everything they have been through in the fifty to ninety plus years of their lives, and living couldn’t have been, didn’t come easy. In fact, some of the most difficult battles ushered in positive changes for blacks, women and immigrants, for Americans. Wasn’t it worth it? Are your descendants not worthy of similar? So, it hurts me to hear Democratic voters of those generations, the ones with a longer view of history than someone like me who was nowhere close to being a Snickers bar in my dad’s back pocket in the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s, slamming the candidate they dislike with non-arguments like their sex, skin color, religion and choice of spouse. This prejudice is what you fought against! Long-term immigrants who state they will not vote for Obama because he is “a black,” men who will not vote for Hillary because she is “a woman,” Christians and Hindus who will not vote for “a Muslim” and so forth, take a minute to listen to yourselves. I expect this non-issue-focused behavior of the neocon wing of the opposing party who see your Wright and raise you a Hagee, not from folks who label themselves as liberal or intellectual. Change once came in forms that were not quantifiable and not recognizable. You were a part of that scary change and look where it got you and those who followed. It comes again. It’s our turn. Let go so we can enter the unknown to make it right for our children and theirs.

I am far from emptying the glass of Obama or Democrat KoolAid. If anything, having lived in New Orleans for little more than half a decade, especially after August 29th, 2005, has made me suspicious of anyone who runs for political office. (Tell me you wouldn’t be if Ray Nagin and Renee Gill Pratt were two of your parish’s Dem superdelegates.) The current process is dead to me. This does not mean that I am jaded or complacent; I am just the opposite, very actively not buying the bullshit. Voters like me need the promise of a better political infrastructure – one not caught up in maintaining itself at the cost of the country itself – as well as someone competent and inclusive at the helm. As John McQuaid recently posted, “Yes, government at all levels has failed New Orleans. And individuals have done their best to make up for it, often with minimal government support and a great deal of government interference. But that doesn’t mean those people wouldn’t be a lot better off with a government that actually was working to help them.” So, this is my request of the next president and those who put him or her in office: we’re Americans, we’re yours. Ask us to step up to the plate, but give us well-built bats, real helmets and a good game, not one in which members of our own team turn against us or we have to pummel the opposing team to a pulp to win. Or we’ll leave America, mentally then physically. It’s not deserting America. It is America deserting us.

The solution to this ultimatum is, of course, a change of current ways. Ask us to look at each other as people, tell us to stop averting our eyes from the realities of poverty and homelessness, ask us to drive fuel-efficient cars and push us onto trains, quit taxing us and not the corporations and calling it capitalism, demand that we meet challenges of necessity and innovation after first advising us to define what necessity and product means, ask us to support an overhaul of schools, call for an America which makes us demand the most of ourselves and each other. And, for God’s sake, stop placating us and, in turn, yourselves. We don’t need coddling, money and stuff for today, we need a future for all the days beyond. We need value. And you need us. Just ask, damn it.